Virtual and augmented reality were hot topics at SXSW this year, but the conversations extended beyond headsets. To be truly immersive, experiences need to incorporate all five senses. Sight, sound, touch, smell, and even taste.
No company knows more about technology and human senses thanDolby, which has pioneered everything from surround sound to HDRimaging. I was fortunate enough to sit down with Dolby Laboratories’ Chief Scientist, Poppy Crum, at the show.
Crum is also an adjunct professor at Stanford University in the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics and the Program in Symbolic Systems. Crum was at SXSW as part of the IEEE’s Tech for Humanity Series. She understands sound and a whole lot more.
Costa: Poppy, thanks so much for joining us today.
Crum: Thank you for having me. It’s great to be here.
So we’re going to talk about hearables, we’re going to talk about augmented reality, we’re going to talk about maybe a little virtual reality, maybe we’ll talk about those painless migraines that the two of us experience from time to time. First of all, your role at Dolby. What does a work day look like for you? What do you do when you get to the office?
We have a large team of computational neuroscientists and people that are experts in sensory perception. If you look back at the history of Dolby and go back, even 50 years, at the core of the company, it has always been an understanding of human experience. I think it helped differentiate how we think about building technology.
So on a daily basis, the people on my team and the people I work with, we look across technologies. We’re not just sound anymore, it’s really about a holistic sense. We have labs, and there are a lot of experiments that go on throughout the day.
Our new building has up to 100 labs, but we’ve got some amazing biophysical labs. My background is as a neuro physiologist—the same with a lot of people on our teams. And there’s human physiology that’s happening on a daily basis to think about new technologies, and there’s some very seminal work happening on thinking about how we experience information that’s multisensory and really looking towards how are we going to consume content in the future that is so rich and what that’s going to mean for how it affects our bodies, how it affects how we engage with others and our senses.
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Source: PCMAG