You Can Now Chat With Others While Deep In The Water With New Messaging App

Messaging technology is taking a deep dive into the ocean with a new app that allows people to chat back and forth under the sea.

The University of Washington’s Tuochu Chen, Justin Chan, and Shyamnath Gollakota spearheaded the research that resulted in the creation of a novel technology enabling people to stay linked while traveling through the deep blue.

While communication advances have enabled us to send data even into space, the limit of telecommunications appears to be the ocean. This is due to the fact that the waves in the water absorb radio signals, preventing phones from receiving any kind of connection.

This is why submarines and other underwater crafts have to be tethered to their origin in order to send and retrieve data from land.

Researchers have now found a way to work around this technological block by using sound waves instead to send messages. The Mobile Intelligence Lab at the University of Washington has invented a way for phones to alert one another.

Essentially, the speakers of our phones will emit high-frequency audio to transmit messages.

All potential divers would need to do is download the open-source ‘AquaApp’ and get a waterproof case, and then they’ll be ready to chat away among the fishes.

However, the app does take into account the distance between you and a fellow diver, as well as which part of the ocean you are in, to determine the strength of the signal between your phones.

As the team carried out experiments to test the app, the scientists found that alerts were still strong for up to 100 meters (328 feet) between two participants. The app also constantly reconfigures its signal strength. This means that every time it receives a prompt from another phone, it will determine how strong or weak that signal is and adjust its next outgoing ‘ping’.

AquaApp provides a pre-determined list of 240 traditional hand gestures divers use when below the surface. Those using the app can send these signs back and forth to each other.

This will greatly benefit new divers, who won’t need to learn a whole new “language” before taking a simple dive on a vacation, for example. However, it's hard to say if the app will completely erase years of hand-signing tradition that has been woven into the sport of diving. 

[via TechCrunch and ScienceDaily, cover image via University of Washington]