Slashdot Mirror
3D Sound by Creator of MP3
im333mfg writes "News.com has an article detailing the Fraunhofer Institute for Media Technology's latest and greatest audio solution, Iosono, or as they're putting it 'true three dimensional audio, which can give the impression of, for example, a horse galloping through the center aisle of a movie theater, or pinpoint a noise so that it sounds exactly like a person shouting from outside theater walls. The best existing surround sound speakers can approximate this only for a small sweet spot, perhaps a few feet wide, while the Iosono system would create the same realistic illusion for everyone in the room.'"
Will someone in the porn industry pick this up? I can't wait to download convincing lesbian orgy movies and feel like i'm right in the middle of the action.
replacing it with NEW Folger's Crystals! (lets see if they notice the difference)
The first person to tie this to a worldwide conspiracy against OGG gets a pizza.
What about farts? Will the theatre shake?
To do this, they use an array of small speakers, sometimes as many as 300 or 400.
Not very surprising that 300 speakers will give you a better surround experience.
The article says "To do this, they use an array of small speakers, sometimes as many as 300 or 400. A complicated algorithm works out exactly what the sound waves all through a room would be...". This sounds very like the phased array speaker technology that 1 Limited have been using from some years to deliver true surround sound from a flat panel speaker.
If intelligent life is too complex to evolve on its own, who designed God?
Byt the way, anyone knows how is it related to this: Single Speaker Unit Delivers Surround Sound?
No doubt they have taken patents out, despite audio holograms being described in a speech at Dennis Garbor's 1971 Nobel prize ceremony. Presumably there are papers out there dating from 1950 as well.
People have also been using computers to generate holograms for years, so the algorithms can hardly be new.
There is an exact distance required between each speaker, and also a lot of speakers involved as well. According to the article, we're talking 300 to 400 small speakers in a grid spread out over the space of the entire theater room.
Of course it's much easier to make a virtual point from which the sound is coming from when you have so many real points that the sound can start at to play with.
To do this, they use an array of small speakers, sometimes as many as 300 or 400. A complicated algorithm works out exactly what the sound waves all through a room would be if, say, the horse were galloping through the center aisle
Yes thats right 300-400 speakers, i must say this is downright impractical for all but the most crazed of audiophiles. Interesting and superior technology to whats out there, but sounds like this will go the way of the betamax
Nuclear war would really set back cable. - Ted Turner
So do they hand you your headphones when you first enter the theatre (thus dooming you to a particular seat), or after you sit down?
Once again, we run into an amusing attempt to get around a fundamental limit in human perception... We have two ears, and our skin can detect (with almost no dicriminatory ability) strong low-frequency sound. Two channels plus the bass.
So why do research groups like Dolby and Fraunhofer keep coming out with new ideas like this "3d" sound? More channels (given an encoding that can make use of them) just adds degrees of freedom to where someone can sit (ie, expands the "sweet" spot) and get decent quality sound - At the expense of more, higher-quality speakers, various sound dampening and/or reflecting materials, architectural considerations, etc. Quality headphones and a subwoofer, OTOH, can always do better, with no extra requirements beyond not having too much background noise.
you insensitive clod...
Wouldn't it be better if the main thing contained a link to the English part of the site rather than the German? http://www.iosono-sound.com/eng/index.html
This can already be done with headphones anyway, using cards like SB Live (I think) and Aureal Vortex cards. Not good for cinema though, but for computer audio, it would work fine.
The IOSONO people didn't invent wave field synthesis. People got serious about it in the Netherlands and France in the 1980's (here).
However, the reason why it took until the 1980's to do it isn't that people didn't think of it before, but simply that hardware and software had developed to the point that that became feasible. I suspect that if you do some digging, you can probably find the suggestion earlier. It's really a pretty straightforward idea.
Of course, that won't keep people from trying to slice their patents out of it. It's MP3 all over again.
"I can't wait to download convincing lesbian orgy movies and feel like i'm right in the middle of the action."
;-)
If YOU are right in the middle of the action, then it can possibly be convincing.
"This sounds very like the phased array speaker technology that 1 Limited [1limited.com] have been using from some years"
Phased array speakers were introduced approx 30 years ago by Dahlquist.
This sounds very like the phased array speaker technology that 1 Limited have been using ...
Possibly, although the Fraunhofer Institute seems to be doing it in a massively less efficient way.
The key issue seems to be that as you progress from just a few point sources to hundreds, you're no longer just approximating a fully distributed source but you're actually starting to implement one physically. Once you accept that that's what you're doing, then you should stop thinking about "number of speakers" and focus on area coverage with flat panels.
Nobody is nuts enough to consider wiring up hundreds of speakers as a viable home market option, but replacing wallpaper with a few large robust decorative sound panels would easily be acceptable in many an ordinary home.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
While IRCAM says:
Huyghens' Principle
To illustrate Huyghens' principle, let us consider a simple example. A rock (or primary source) thrown in the middle of a pond generates a wave front that propagates along the surface. Huyghens' principle indicates that an identical wave front can be generated by simultaneously dropping an infinite number of rocks (secondary sources) along any position defined by the passage of the primary wave front. This synthesized wave front will be perfectly accurate outside of the zone delimited by the secondary source distribution. The secondary sources therefore act as a "relay", and can reproduce the original primary wave front in absence of a primary source!
Origins of Wave Field Synthesis
Wave Field Synthesis (WFS) is based on a series of simplifications of the previous principle. The first work to have been published on the subject dates back to 1988 and is attributed to Professor A.J. Berkhout of the acoustics and seismology team of the Technological University of Delft (T.U.D.) in Holland. This research was continued throughout the 90's by the T.U.D. as well as by the Research and Development department of France Telecom Lannion.
loc. cit.
CC.
TaijiQuan (Huang, 5 loosenings)
Isn't this going to turn into a phasey mess? The beaming effects and reflections off walls from all those speakers is going to trash music.
Eww, really?
Old people fall. Young people spring. Rich people summer and winter.
I believe the audiobook of Steven King's "The Mist" did this a number of years ago, in at least 1995 or earlier? All it required was one set of headphones and you could hear a fly buzzing around your ear or could practically see someone walk past you if you closed your eyes.
thehomeland(.org)
Fraunhofer Gesellschaft IIS has a history of defending their IP (MPEG 1 audio layer 3 e.g. MP3). As most /.-ers know, MP3 decoder licensing is free, but a "commercial" encoder will cost ya (licensing info). I wonder what the scam will be for losono.....
The Russians have won. They have made the world a cesspool of distrust, greed, fear and hate.
Normally, moving around a couple of feet will truly change the way you perceive sound. It's one of the major challenges for sound engineers (which is perfectly demonstrated in Spatial Sound by Francis Rumsey. Great book by the way)
Please login to access my lawn
There is a much cheaper way to do this.
.... Play ...
...
Simply purchase a polystyrene head (of the sort used for placing wigs and hairpeices)
Slice down the middle with a hot wire and hollow out the ear canals for two microphones and embed these in the head. Glue back together and jack the trailing leads from your head's "ears" into your favorite recording equipments. And
It works , its cheap and simple, and best of all no fraunhoffer licensing fee's
here are some examples (including mp3's) of the technique...
Binauraul Holophonic Sound
Nick
Electronic Music Made Using Linux http://soundcloud.com/polyp
1. This is Fraunhofer we're talking about here, and they were quite aggressive in ridding the world of those damned pesky free MP3 encoders. This announcement may be news for nerds, but it ain't stuff that matters to the free & open-source community (technically speaking)..
n dex.html.
2. As another post points out, wave field synthesis is hardy a new thing. Marije Baalman demonstrated her recent work at the last Linux audio conference in April, you can check out her implementation of the system at http://gigant.kgw.tu-berlin.de/~baalman/program/i
Cool stuff...
So far, the only true sound reproduction without any purity problem that was ever created is monaural. It doesn't have phasing problems, it doesn't have listener's position problems, it doesn't have any problem whatsoever. We know the sound is coming from that column you see there and the sound is pristine, perfect quality.
... an experiment. If it works, it will become another IMAX/OMNIMAX where you need to go to science expos to see carefully selected footage that will give you the maximum sensations and show what it should be in movies.
...? When most theaters are not even THX approved and don't plan on be... and when most movies don't really use anything else than left-center-right ... What's the deal?
... and I will start to be interested to 500.
Since the 70's, stereophonic sound has made it big. We all know stereo sound is perfect to listen to music. And it truly is. You can immerse yourself in music, be with the musicians. We still have problems with phasing, with distortion, with creating a really good panoramic sound, with filling the room with music, with being able not to pinpoint where the speakers are... these are slowly resolved. We're getting there.
Then there's the 3-channel surround sound... 4-channel... 5-channel... 6-channel... 7-channel...
Heck, when I go see a recent movie, I hardly hear the 3rd channel being used. Sometimes with some SFX, sometimes with some bad quality wooshing effect. Some movies will be pointed to me as using that quality I am looking for. What are they? 5 movies over the whole lot?
Take the latest James Bond. You sometimes hear ambience on the back speakers... ooh big deal.
And don't speak me about the "walking stick" the ".1" channel is. If the quality was there, we would have 5 real channels of pure full-frequency range sound, including low frequencies.
So for me, this experiment is precisely that
And what about the quality of these speakers? I mean, I can barely buy two good speakers at $1000. What about 200? What about all the problems of movie production, sound reproduction, positionning, quality, sound check,
Would a movie producer be really interested in making a scene where you hear two actors arriving from the aisles, where you hear them perfectly but don't see them on screen because it would all screw up our small minds, seeing them in front but hearing them to our side? Meh, not so sure!
Anyways, let's just finish this by saying : Ok, 500 speakers if you want... but start by give me the same quality and use that quality in 5 channels
Mike