Upon first read, we were inclined to believe that the words gracing our eyes here simply couldn't be true. But then we realized that this
is NTT DoCoMo, and beyond the realm of feasibility is where this company resides. In a beautiful attempt to provide
superhuman-like hearing to all Earthlings, the company has developed a highly efficient mobile
spatial audio transmission technology that enables "a mobile phone user to assign a spatial position to each sound source when listening to multiple sound sources, such as during a game or a conference call." Put simply, the tech allows a user listening with headphones to "hear each speaker's voice as if it were coming from a unique direction, creating a virtual face-to-face communication environment." We're not told specifically how many voices the average bird can hear before it becomes too overwhelming, but we'll go out on a limb here and say three or four, max.
posted May 11th 2009 9:06AM
Sweet as bre
So then I said... haha... why?
This is stupid as hell. Supposed to place one behind you. Normally, you could turn around to hear that person better, but no matter how much you turn around, that person is still going to be behind you until you go in and reconfigure them.
"This" is not stupid as hell. Assigning a user to be behind you would be stupid as hell. There's a simple solution: don't be stupid as hell.
In any case, spatial audio technology has been around forever, but this is an interesting but not earth-shattering application of it.
We all don't have "Dumbo ears" like you. I hear things behind me perfectly fine.
if i had to guess, it sounds like they're just encoding the channels in binaural audio. it's been around for a long long time, but it's nice to see it utilized for a useful application. (other than cd's with sounds moving around your head.)
cool?
I still don't get what this does....
It simulates a position for every voice in your headphones. That way, one person could sound like they're to your left, one to your right, one in front of you, etc. It could be helpful in conference calls and chat lines.
hmm. I could see something like this working well with Cisco's Telepresence.
Marco
But why?
It improves (human) speaker recognition. Useful in situations where... it may be heard to recognize speakers. For example, I've taken many conference calls for work where people will speak up and I'm not sure who's talking, to which I invariably have to interrupt them and ask "Sorry, but who was that speaking?" This technology would help that because their spatial position would be another clue as to who they are.
It improves (human) speaker recognition. Useful in situations where... it may be hard to recognize speakers. For example, I've taken many conference calls for work where people will speak up and I'm not sure who's talking, to which I invariably have to interrupt them and ask "Sorry, but who was that speaking?" This technology would help that because their spatial position would be another clue as to who they are.
So then I said...why?
Because they can. So I just moved to Japan and I got a Softbank phone but this has me thinking, "Maybe I should have gone with Docomo?"
Stop! Make the voices stop!
I didn't realize you needed to be superhuman to hear in stereo.
A quick search shows this http://www.practical-home-theater-guide.com/dolby-headphone.html (no, not going to try to encode a URL without preview).
So, according to that, since 2001 Dolby has had 5.1 simulation for headphones.
From what I've heard from others, it applies transforms (read: distortion) to the signal simulating the way sound gets distorted and echos when hitting your outer ears from different directions (to grossly oversimplify it).
For some reason, the title makes me think McDonalds.
What you really need with this is postion/orientation tracking, so that each voice/sound source seems to occupy the correct position relative to you. So if they're "standing behind" you, as you turn around, you seem to be gradually "facing" them. Think of the applications in a holodeck-like simulator, or a first-person POV game...
How is this different from mumbles postitional audio?
Hey Engadget, I'm pretty sure this is the "normal human" hearing experience, not superhuman. Your wit has failed you today.