Tag Archives: Sound

Bose AR, Audio Augmented Reality – Use Cases

I’ve been enamored with Bose products for well over a decade. However,  we’ve seen quality brands enter the hi-fidelity audio market over that time.  Beyond quality design in their classic audio products, can Bose Augmented Reality (Bose AR) be the market differentiator?

Bose: Using a Bose-AR-equipped wearable, a smartphone, and an app-enabled with Bose AR, the new platform lets you hear what you see.

It sounds like Bose may come up with an initial design, sunglasses, but turn to 3rd party hardware manufacturers of all sorts to integrate Bose AR into other wearable products.

Bose Augmented Reality isn’t just about audio. The devices will use sensors to track head motions for gesture controls and work with GPS from a paired smartphone to track location.  The company also aspires to combine visual information with the Bose AR platform.

Bose AR Use Cases

  • Bose Augmented Reality device reenact historical events or speeches from landmarks and statues as you visit them.
  • The Bose and NFL partnership could be leveraged to get these AR units into the football player’s helmets.  Audio queues from the on-field lead, quarterback, and dynamically replayed/relayed at the appropriate time of required action by the receiver.
  • Audio directions to your gate when your GPS detects that you’ve arrived at the airport, or any other destination from your calendar.  Audio queues would be richer the more inclusive you are to the access to Calendars, To Do lists, etc.
  • Combine visual information with the Bose AR platform, too, so you could hear a translation of a sign you’re looking at.
  • Hear the history of a painting in a museum.

Time until it’s in consumer’s hands?  TBD.  Bose objective is to have the developer kit, including a pair of glasses, available later this year.

When I was on vacation in Athens, Greece, I created a post which had Greek actors running tours in their ancient, native garb.  The Bose AR could be a complementary offering to the tour, which includes live, greek local actors portraying out scenes in ancient ruins.  Record the scenes, and interact with them while walking through the Greek ruins in your Bose AR (Augmented Reality) glasses.

Greece, Prosperity, and Taxes: The World Will Come See You in AR

Please take a moment to prioritize the use cases, or add your own.

Takeaway

I’m a cheerleader for Bose, among several others in this space, but I question a Bose AR headset that produces a high fidelity sound. Most of the use cases listed should be able to “get along OK” with an average quality sound.  Maybe high definition AR games with a high level of realism might benefit from the high-quality sound. However, their site reads like Bose is positioning themselves as a component to be integrated into other AR headsets, i.e. “Bose-AR-equipped wearable

Hashtags Embedded in Sound Waves of Songs: Watermarks

Sound, or video is able to be embedded with hash tag information like a watermark in the song, and this hash tag information can then be used as a link or other information which can be used as a link to a fan site, e.g first 100 users of purchase get x tickets for the purchase of the song, or backstage passes to the next concert in your area.

Hash tags that are embedded in the sound of a song may be used dynamically, such as the live broadcast of the song, and offering the user to call or text a number to receive a prize, or embedded in the purchase of a song, so when the song plays,the information will be sent generically to a ratings association to get better quality of a Top 40 ratings. The hash tags may also be used for dynamic posting of the song to your social network of preference, e.g. #NP, now playing., optionally, as specified by the user.

Additionally, if the consumer can automatically post the unique code of the song as a hash tag in a special music service, maybe variations of their favorite song may exist, e.g. the acoustic, or concert version of the song instead of the studio version, and through the posting of this hash tag into this special music social network, fans may be able to identify and acquire unique recordings of their favorite songs.

There is the ability to embedded the watermark of the artist images in the song, such as the JPEGs of the artists signatures, concert pictures, or any other special information, Watermark signals in audio and video is not new, but typically used in an encrypted manner to ensure the artist, music distribution and production company ensure their appropriate share in the profit margin.  Used in this manner, embedded information in the sound waves allows the users to access addition fan content.

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Consumer Electronics Show Highlight: The Chipset Challenge

Today I talked with a few brilliant engineers about their latest, to be released Chipsets, and was I blown away by the brilliance of these product engineers and managers.  Two chips I would like to briefly highlight today are the Qualcomm Snapdragon 800, and the Nvidia Tegra 4 Chipset advancements.

Qualcomm

The Qualcomm Snapdragon Chipset is so off the charts amazing from a consumer standpoint, they had a room with a tablet plugged into a large high definition headset, and the room encapsulated a complete set of surround sound speakers, as well as each chair was equipped with a common headset.  The tablet was plugged into the HD system through an HDMI cable, and that was it.  I won’t bore you about 2K verses 4K High Definition upgrade standards, but what I can tell you was the video sequence they played on this Android tablet was of such high caliber quality and no lag whatsoever, and the sound was so superb, it would in fact give ANY of the movie theaters I have been to ever, a run for their money.  I have been to quite a few movies in my lifetime.

The Nvidia team had us put on the headsets, which were your basic headsets, nothing special, but the same N channel surround sound that came out of each channel, e.g. center, front & side left, front & side right, and back channels was emulated through the headsets with the same superior sound quality, and power.  The demonstrators had us remove our headsets as they were blasting sound through each channel, and we couldn’t believe the sound was not coming through the speakers, but was coming through the headsets themselves.

Qualcomm is looking at the second half of this year for general release to be pushed to their partners, and/or the consumers.  That part was unclear, however, what was clear, was the amazing power you will have in your Android tablet coming soon.

Qualcomm Snapdragon 800
Qualcomm Snapdragon 800

Nvidia

I had the rare pleasure to speak with an amazing engineer at NVidia that took the time and patience to go through advancements of the Nvidia Tegra 4 Chipset.  Instead of giving you the granular tech jargonese that we went through, I will sum it up in two ways.  The Nvidia Tegra 3 Chipset already had an efficiency with a 5th core that primarily remained idle, and was used to gain battery life in mobile phones.  What it did, and continues to do in the Tegra 4, at an idle period of the phone, instead of using these four massive processors to burn up the battery life, this 5th ‘light weight’, low power consumption core would handle the idle times, and give the four massive boys a rest.  This extends the battery life significantly.  Well, now the boys and girls at Nvidia said, after Tegra 3, hey, we have this 5th core, let’s allow ourselves to push the envelope slightly, not only use this core for battery life efficiency on your phone, but let’s let the mobile applications have access to this core so now you have 4 mean, powerful cores hard at work, and one slightly advanced core being used for both efficiency and graphical applications, like games.  Brilliant.

Nvidia Tegra 4
Nvidia Tegra 4

Finally, Nvidia doesn’t stop there, it is now in the business development phase of bringing you cloud gaming, essentially Elastic Computing for Graphical Calculations in a cloud with an exponential set of these Chipsets, where you can subscribe to this gaming service, and all of the hard core tough calculations of rendering graphics at lighting speed is done in the cloud, and just the basic pixels get pushed to your phone, relatively a really light weight signature. Your phone or computer becomes a terminal emulator, which can focus on your inputs, instead of graphic rendering, and the cloud does all the hard work, again, brilliant, and the future of gaming.  The engineer and I just looked at each other, and we knew, this was the pie in the sky for the gaming industry.  Hold on to your hats, this is going to be a wild ride.  Now, they are still in the stage where they must solidify the details with a cloud company that hosts these servers, and provides the gaming service, e.g. business development, but the technology has arrived.  In addition, engineering and science packages like Mathematica may also use this type of Elastic Computing High Yield for massive calculations.

Nvidia Grid Cloud Gaming
Nvidia Grid Cloud Gaming