The most recent announcement from NTT DOCOMO reveals the development of a highly efficient mobile spatial audio transmission technology. While listening to multiple sound sources, this technology allows users to allocate a spatial position to each sound source.
With the new mobile spatial audio transmission technology, users can clearly listen to each speaker’s voice as if it is coming from a different direction. It creates a virtual face-to-face communication environment and thus improves a user’s listening experience with headphones.
The existing spatial audio transmission technologies separate the operation of audio encoding/decoding and spatial audio synthesis whereas this new technology integrates the two processes in order to offer a more efficient method. This reduces the bitrate and computation loads which are suitable for mobile phones and other resource-limited devices.
Both these processes perform profoundly on the server side as well as the client side. The server side of this technology recognizes the important sound components of each speaker’s voice and then efficiently compresses them into a single stream. On completion of this process, the streams are then transmitted to the mobile phones. The received streams are then decoded by each phone and it simultaneously synthesizes the spatial audio images.
Further more, DOCOMO is constantly doing researches and developing the technologies that satisfy the needs of eventual commercialization, foresees applications such as mobile conference calls, tele-education and online games.
There is no word on its availability and pricing details as yet.