Or, "Project Headspace".
The current market: Current surround-sound headphones are complete bollocks. Fitting five speakers into each earpiece is expensive, drastically diminishes the audio quality, and doesn't actually provide surround sound. The only thing it does get right is the shift in tone from projecting the audio from behind or in front of your ear, but this is all but annihilated by the reflections within the closed ear cup. People are paying a premium, receiving worse audio quality, and not gaining any benefit. Frankly, I'm surprised that Monster Audio haven't made a pair!
On the earphone front, phone companies are now selling "premium" earbuds in a bid to diversify and solidify their marketshare. Samsung in particular are now offering several tiers of LEVEL products which provide questionable value coupled to an unquestionable overuse of plastic chrome.
Apple has Beats. In an interesting turn however, I was reading a rumour about the iPhone 6 potentially dropping the 3.5mm headphone jack to make the device slimmer. This coincided with Apple updating their peripheral design rules to include headsets running through the lightning connector. I thought, "To get people to accept the loss of the 3.5mm format, you would have to make the replacement WORTH the jump. Hey, I've just been working on this for the last few months!"
The gist: The 3DS as a virtual headset had me thinking about coordinating two geomagnetic sensors (compasses, as in your phone). If you have one in your hand and one on your face, you could make them work relatively to each other. So the gamepad could be your gun, and the sound would seemingly originate from that point in space, even if you hold it backwards over your head!
If we put a geomagnetic sensor in a pair of USB earbuds, when you're looking directly at the screen you are getting an "even" mixdown of the 5.1/7.1 audio channels, with the rear channels being modified by an equaliser to simulate sound hitting the back of your ears. This is quite similar to the "virtualised" 5.1 found in single-driver gaming headsets, but without the need for heavy time delays and echo to be applied to "expand the sound stage". This sound stage is real and dynamic.
When you turn your head, the mix of the audio will shift. If you were to look at the (virtual) left front speaker, its audio would be 50/50 to each ear, the left rear speaker would become more clear as it shifted from behind you, the centre would become right biased, and the right side speakers would become less clear as they shifted into your "hearing shadow".
This decoupling of visual to aural information is actually incredibly powerful, a movement of just a few degrees is enough to trick your brain into creating a 3D audio space. If you were to play games like Call of Duty, moving your head as if you were wearing a TrackIR (turn your head, not your gaze) would give you an incredible awareness of where enemy players are, making you able to track people through walls while visually covering another entrance.
This is the first gaming headset which ACTUALLY gives you an edge, and the hardware is so simple that it can be retroactively applied to existing games (as long as they have 5.1+ output). The only technology involved is a USB 5.1 sound card and the same sensor array found in every mobile device. It's cheap and tiny, it can even be integrated into an earbud!
The current market: Current surround-sound headphones are complete bollocks. Fitting five speakers into each earpiece is expensive, drastically diminishes the audio quality, and doesn't actually provide surround sound. The only thing it does get right is the shift in tone from projecting the audio from behind or in front of your ear, but this is all but annihilated by the reflections within the closed ear cup. People are paying a premium, receiving worse audio quality, and not gaining any benefit. Frankly, I'm surprised that Monster Audio haven't made a pair!
On the earphone front, phone companies are now selling "premium" earbuds in a bid to diversify and solidify their marketshare. Samsung in particular are now offering several tiers of LEVEL products which provide questionable value coupled to an unquestionable overuse of plastic chrome.
Apple has Beats. In an interesting turn however, I was reading a rumour about the iPhone 6 potentially dropping the 3.5mm headphone jack to make the device slimmer. This coincided with Apple updating their peripheral design rules to include headsets running through the lightning connector. I thought, "To get people to accept the loss of the 3.5mm format, you would have to make the replacement WORTH the jump. Hey, I've just been working on this for the last few months!"
The gist: The 3DS as a virtual headset had me thinking about coordinating two geomagnetic sensors (compasses, as in your phone). If you have one in your hand and one on your face, you could make them work relatively to each other. So the gamepad could be your gun, and the sound would seemingly originate from that point in space, even if you hold it backwards over your head!
If we put a geomagnetic sensor in a pair of USB earbuds, when you're looking directly at the screen you are getting an "even" mixdown of the 5.1/7.1 audio channels, with the rear channels being modified by an equaliser to simulate sound hitting the back of your ears. This is quite similar to the "virtualised" 5.1 found in single-driver gaming headsets, but without the need for heavy time delays and echo to be applied to "expand the sound stage". This sound stage is real and dynamic.
When you turn your head, the mix of the audio will shift. If you were to look at the (virtual) left front speaker, its audio would be 50/50 to each ear, the left rear speaker would become more clear as it shifted from behind you, the centre would become right biased, and the right side speakers would become less clear as they shifted into your "hearing shadow".
This decoupling of visual to aural information is actually incredibly powerful, a movement of just a few degrees is enough to trick your brain into creating a 3D audio space. If you were to play games like Call of Duty, moving your head as if you were wearing a TrackIR (turn your head, not your gaze) would give you an incredible awareness of where enemy players are, making you able to track people through walls while visually covering another entrance.
This is the first gaming headset which ACTUALLY gives you an edge, and the hardware is so simple that it can be retroactively applied to existing games (as long as they have 5.1+ output). The only technology involved is a USB 5.1 sound card and the same sensor array found in every mobile device. It's cheap and tiny, it can even be integrated into an earbud!
