A futuristic vision of gadgets that can home in on birdsong in the inner city, cameras that capture parallel universes and even bags of coffee which change colour as they gather air miles was unveiled today as part of a new science and design show.
The ideas were put forward among 16 projects mounted in the Impact! exhibition bringing together Royal College of Art graduate designers working with scientists and other academic specialists throughout the UK.
The projects include research at the Centre for Digital Music at Queen Mary, University of London, where specialists are attempting to build a device that will be able to separate out and recognise complex sounds.
The research has raised the possibility of machines that can pick out a door slamming, leaves rustling and even birdsong through the fog of noise in heavily populated cities.
Those working on the study said it might in the future be developed to monitor and improve security in public places as well as a means of filtering out unwanted noise such as traffic in favour of the sounds of the natural world.
Mark Plumbley, research leader at the centre, said: "Our research is into how you might build a device that will listen to the world around us and make sense of and separate out sounds that are part of a mixture of things that go on in everyday life.
"Our research is looking at how you pick out a small number of sounds from a large number of sounds that are going on around us. The exhibit is about taking things beyond that and thinking about how we might change the way we think about the world of sound and how it can affect society if we have these kinds of super listening devices."
Other exhibits on show included the Fair Tracing project where researchers have examined the use of digital technology to track and trace products such as coffee and wine from the producer to the supermarket shelves.
Apurba Kundu, of Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge, said the design project put forward a futuristic vision of products with a "living skin" translating consumer information into patterns, smells or textures.
He said: "The skin would change like fruit and you would get that instant feed-back in the way that you get from melons or tomatoes."
The exhibition is the first of its kind between the funding agency for science and engineering, the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts, and the RCA.
Other projects examined at the show include powerful "quantum computers" along with a fictional "fifth dimensional" camera able to capture parallel universes - and a scheme to combine wind, wave and sun energy in one energy converter.
The show also looks at research into creating synthetic cells and a synthetic immune system.
Anthony Dunne, head of design interactions at the RCA, said the show was a collaboration between "very creative people and very creative scientists".
He said: "We hope that it will show how designers can participate in science research, not just by focusing on the marketing end of things but by being involved in the conceptual research side."
Helen Bailey, of the EPSRC and project manager for the exhibition, said she hoped it would attract a new audience and communicate to people the value, importance and excitement of current scientific research.