Automotive

Dynamic focused sound system beams music directly to a passenger's ears

Kids in the back will be able to listen to their favorite music without disturbing parents up front if the Seat/Noveto demonstration is successful
Seat/Noveto
Kids in the back will be able to listen to their favorite music without disturbing parents up front if the Seat/Noveto demonstration is successful
Seat/Noveto

Listening to some tunes while driving is great if you're on your own, but if you have passengers with varied tastes then pleasing everyone can be a problem. We've seen the likes of Harman and Hyundai-Kia envelop individuals in their own audio bubbles, but the dynamic focused sound system being tested by car maker Seat at the moment promises to wirelessly deliver sound direct to a driver or passenger's ears.

Israel's Noveto launched its My Virtual Headphones technology at CES 2018, where sensors track a listener's head movement, source audio is sent through Noveto's processing and digital signal processing engines and transducers wirelessly focus sound directly to the music lover's ears.

Now the company has signed up with Seat to demonstrate that the technology can be successfully integrated into the car maker's vehicles, aiming to allow kids in the back to each listen to their own favorites, while the driver can hear navigation instructions or a personal playlist while the front passenger gets engrossed in a podcast or audio book. All oblivious to each other's audio streams.

Few details on how the system actually works have been revealed, but we're no strangers to targeted audio – having previously followed the progress Richard Haberkern's Soundlazer technology from parametric pocket speaker to and overhead planar wave system. The Noveto dynamic focused sound system adds user tracking to the mix and promises high quality audio for each listener.

"Applying this new technology will enable us to open a world of possibilities for privately owned vehicles, and especially for shared vehicles," said Seat's Fabian Simmer. "Being able to share your car and maintain your privacy is certainly a challenge that seems increasingly achievable, with solutions like the one proposed by Noveto which we hope to feature in our vehicles."

Source: Seat

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3 comments
f8lee
This brings to mind something I read about a few years ago - some kind of phased array microphone system that would pick out an individual conversation in an arena full of people using a ring-shaped microphone array hanging from the ceiling...in this case it's the opposite, with transducers generating the pressure waves and focusing them on an individual in the car.
Derek Howe
sounds great.
Signguy
I live in an area where the trains BLAST their horns...all hours of the day and night, so anyone in the 10 mile radius hears it & keeps them awake. This is a system I read about years ago and I believe should be applied to the train horns; it would blast the hell out of anyone on the tracks, but NO ONE else!