In the near future, fans of listening to music so as not to disturb others, or gamers will not be able to be taken by surprise. New acoustic technology directs the sound beam directly into the listener’s ears without blocking out ambient sounds.
An innovative technology, called SoundBeamer 1.0 was presented on Friday, 13th November. It can direct a sound bubble into your head using sound beaming — no headphones are required. It appears to have a bunch of practical uses, for example, for attendees of conference or anybody, who doesn’t want to disturb others with the music. Nowadays, 3D spatial audio is something companies like Apple and Sony are working on enhancement. Sony’s 360 Reality Audio format creates much the same feeling of being surrounded by audio – but still with headphones. Sound beaming comes as a game-changer for such branches like the AR and VR applications.
Noveto Systems is an Israeli start-up, which has debuted with the futuristic audio tech with a new desktop device.
The company provided a short demo of the new technology to reporters of the Associated Press. The SoundBeamer device sends 3D audio that surrounds you from all sides, so that you can feel music playing both in front and behind your head.
An array of emitters, that creates the base of the device, operates in the ultrasound range, that is, their signal is practically indistinguishable to the human ear. It turns out that audible sounds are formed by a complex mutual amplification and change in the frequency of ultrasonic waves interacting with each other. But these are only assumptions in our music blog for now.
Apparently, the technology developed by Noveto Systems vaguely resembles the emitters in multimodal acoustic trap displays (MATDs). In November 2019, Naked Science wrote about the development of a similar holographic display. In it, sound traps for light balls are formed between two matrices of ultrasonic sensors. With their help, you can create complex three-dimensional images that can even be felt by your hands.