VirtualSound

The headphone
The headphone on a head

Inspiration

Nowadays, it is common to see (visual) virtual reality systems such as Oculus. But these are virtual reality for eyes, while other senses are left in the real world. For complete immersion, we would need to bring all other senses in a virtual world.

It is also a nice way to bring virtual reality for blind people.

What it does

This system brings us one step further to the total immersion: this is a sound virtual reality system (i.e. virtual reality for ears).

How I built it

A gyroscope sensor has been added on a headphone, to have information about the orientation of the head. We then use audio models and the position of the audio source, to send sent to the headphone the sound that fits the virtual world.

Challenges I ran into

Creating the audio models, for both sampling and processing. Sampling was hard as we needed a model for the head and the ear: We used a case filled with water bottles for the head, and a dictaphone app for the ear. We also had to create a 3D sound model out of this data.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

This may not be the cutting edge of design, all the people who tried were convinced that it works. It clearly is a proof of concept, which was the objective.