Is the constant barrage of news and social media just not immersive enough for you? Longing to hear music inside your head without headphones? An Israeli company called Noveto Systems has developed technology they call “sound beaming” which enables you to listen to music or just about anything else without any devices attached to you. You don’t even have to stand still: the SoundBeamer device will simply “latch” onto you as you move around to project the sound into “sound pockets” around your ears.
How it works
The technology uses a 3-D sensing module and locates and tracks the ear position sending audio via ultrasonic waves to create sound pockets by the user’s ears. Sound can be heard in stereo or a spatial 3-D mode that creates 360 degree sound around the listener…
SoundBeamer Product Manager Ayana Wallwater says that it is like listening to a stereo – but you are the only one who can hear it. And unlike with headphones, you’ll be able to hear other noises in the room that you are in just as clearly as if you were wearing no headphones at all.
Playing sound “inside your head”
Wallwater remarked:
You don’t need to tell the device where you are. It’s not streaming to one exact place. It follows you wherever you go. So it’s personally for you — follows you, plays what you want inside your head.
CEO Christophe Ramstein relates that because the experience is unlike anything anyone has undergone before, it is difficult to explain the sensation. “The brain doesn’t understand what it doesn’t know,” he says.
And these statements are supposed to make us like the product? Call us Luddites, but it all sounds just a tad Orwellian.
If you are nevertheless intrigued, you can learn about it from the brand itself in the video below.