Very neat, this reminds me of the organic shapes of passive demultiplexers in photonics such as https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acsphotonics.7b00987

One more step toward building the pyramids.

okay who wants to build a musical instrument that works by beaming white noise at a bunch of these things, with some way for the user to rotate them quickly and accurately

Whoa it's like an ear but for light!

In the late 80s I worked in a low cluster of buildings, each of which was topped with a band of vertical ridges spaced about 4" apart (sort of like a corrugated roof, but with vertical corrugations). One day a thunderstorm came through, and we discovered that the pulses of thunder, when they hit the corrugations, reflected as a quickly falling tone. The corrugations were working as an acoustic diffraction grating, with different frequencies reflecting in different directions.

Brainstorming applications of knowing your angle relative to a point source:

- adaptive sports for visually impaired players like beep baseball?

- robot swarm members knowing their relative 2d position with a single microphone? (frequency for angle, amplitude for distance)

- a cheap, durable way for human workers to track the rotation cadence of slowly rotating machinery?

This is the kind of thing that keeps me coming back to HN more often than I should. So cool.