A drive through lush green urban woods reveals dozens of nondescript buildings. Mini buses shuttle employees across the company’s 500-acre headquarters in Redmond, Washington. Inside Building 99, a concrete-and-glass structure that houses Microsoft Research, Ivan Tashev walked through the quiet halls toward his lab, where he devised the spatial sound system for HoloLens.
Tashev leads the audio group at Microsoft Research, which is the second largest computer science organization in the world. For HoloLens, a mixed-reality headset that places holograms in your immediate environment, his team devised a sound system that creates the illusion of 3D audio to bring virtual objects to life.
Mixed reality, like virtual reality, is a medium best known for its visual trickery. When you first try on the HoloLens, the thing that instantly grabs your attention is the holographic display: the aliens crawling out of the walls in RoboRaid or Buzz Aldrin walking on the surface of Mars. The device tricks your brain into seeing things that are only visible through the headset. But what makes the holograms seem realistic is the spatial sound system that allows you to engage with the projections. You hear the alien enemies before they break out of the walls, and you can find the astronaut talking to you as he walks across the red planet.
“Spatial sound roots holograms in your world,” says Matthew Lee Johnston, audio innovation director at Microsoft. “The more realistic we can make that hologram sound in your environment the more your brain is going to interpret that hologram as being in your environment.”
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Source: Engadget