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Facebook wants to give us a super hearing through AR glasses. Sound will arrive as realistic as possible in an earpiece with noise canceling.
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“What? I can not hear you.” Facebook wants to end that. Busy, noisy environments in which we do not understand each other and often have difficulty in having a conversation will soon be a thing of the past for Facebook. Facebook Reality Labs Research has assembled an audio team to work on ‘smart audio’.
Facebook wants to ‘reinvent the human hearing’. In addition to improving our hearing in noisy situations, it also wants to create virtual sounds that could be indistinguishable from real, natural sounds.
Augmented Reality
The company plans to use this smart audio in AR glasses and VR headsets. Applied to AR glasses, it could deliver precisely those sounds that are important via a microphone and with the help of indications from the environment via an earpiece with noise canceling. For example, it can amplify the voice of your conversation partner while it softens disturbing ambient noise.
These contextual cues can be obtained from other functions of the AR glasses, such as eye-tracking cameras and direction sensors. For example, the glasses determine where the audio source you are trying to focus on is located.
Natural sound
In addition, it wants to make the voice of your conversation partner, picked up by a microphone, appear as natural as possible. Facebook calls it ‘audio presence’, the feeling that the source of a virtual sound is actually present in the room and that it cannot be distinguished from the real source.
When natural sound reaches us, it is picked up more quickly by one ear than the other, each with a different volume. Influences from the environment and the shape of your ear also determine how a sound will reach your brain. By simulating these factors, sound can be imitated as realistically as possible.
Virtual Reality
That the audio technology will soon also be applied to VR headsets such as the Oculus Quest is not unlikely. This ‘audio presence’ can also significantly improve a VR experience. By making the sound as natural as possible, a VR experience can become even more realistic.
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