This one’s fun. Dean Waters, a bat expert at the University of Leeds, has developed a surroundsound technology that lets you locate an object by using bat-like sonar. From the New Scientist:

Humans cannot generate or hear the high frequency sound waves generated by bats. So Waters created a virtual system that sends out bat echolocation sounds and returns echoes that are slowed into the human range of hearing.

He put people wearing headphones into a room and asked them to hunt down a virtual insect, using only the echolocation sounds. “The trials were extraordinary,” Waters told New Scientist. “It’s a very intuitive process.”

This actually might be quite useful for military applications — such as giving fighter pilots a 360-degree “virtual vison” sense of everything around them, including things they can’t visually see: Planes or missiles beneath or behind them. It could even conceivably be incorporated into cars, so that when you drive, you constantly have a 360-degree sense of how far away every other car is to you.

(Thanks to Boing Boing for this one!)