To follow up on yesterday’s post, what is the logical conclusion of audio-only mixed reality? For a while now, I’ve thought it would be very good spatial audio for telecommunication.
Imagine you have an excellent pair of earbuds connected to a powerful computer. Both your head movement and the physical characteristics of the surrounding physical world are fed to that computer.
The computer computes an audio channel which makes it sound exactly as though another person is in the room with you. You can hear your friend talking, walking or speaking, exactly as though they were physically present.
The only wrinkle is that your friend is invisible. You can do this with multiple friends at the same time — you will all hear each other perfectly well as though you are standing next to each other or sitting around a table together, but you will all be invisible to each other.
Someday soon, as technology supports mass adoption of such capabilities, we may come to take this mode of communication for granted. It will simply seem like a normal way to converse with our friends and colleagues.
I have heard a demo of a voice chat app which positions each speaker to a different place in a virtual room, and it made virtual conversations so much clearer to understand, even with multiple people interjecting into the conversation. Really looking forward to the moment mainstream videocalling apps adopt this.
Ah, this is it. Already productized, just expensive and out of reach for 99 % people right now: https://youtu.be/kTByZP4Xzmc
That’s a positive development. Now let’s see whether we can get a version that is available for the other 99%. That’s the point when it will get interesting.