Apple’s augmented reality focus has so far been on iPhones and iPads, but AR on MacBooks may also be in the company’s sights. A new patent granted today could be useful for both conventional games and AR applications.
The patent for virtual positioning of audio sources builds on one granted last month…
Apple’s previous patent, on a method of virtually positioning people in a room when listening through headphones, focused on a business application – but we noted at the time that AR seemed another obvious use.
The patent granted today, and spotted by Patently Apple, achieves the same thing with MacBook speakers.
The patent positions augmented reality headphones as a business tool, ideal for listening to conference calls, but it’s not hard to imagine entertainment-based uses for the same tech.
It works by canceling crosstalk, which is a similar technique to noise-cancellation. At its simplest, Apple employs noise-cancellation on one side of the MacBook so that the sound appears to come from the other side.
Audio signal processing for virtual acoustics can greatly enhance a movie, a sports even, a videogame or other screen viewing experience, adding to the feeling of “being there”.
But the patent describes supplementing this with a similar approach to the HomePod, where microphones pick up reflected sound and the speaker output can then be adjusted to suit the acoustic characteristics of the room. In this case, adjustments are made so that the combination of direct and reflected sound can be used to fool us into thinking the sound originates from a particular position off to one side.
[For laptop speakers] a crosstalk canceler is employed in some virtual acoustic systems to produce sounds from multiple loudspeakers in such a way that for example a “left” audio signal is predominantly heard only at the left ear of the listener, and a “right” audio signal is predominantly heard only at the right ear of the listener (by virtue of sound wave cancellation in the air surrounding the listener.) This allows the left and right audio signals to contain spatial cues that enable a virtual sound to be “positioned” at a desired location between the loudspeakers.
Of course, direct AR applications on a MacBook would require a rear camera, but it’s possible that an iPhone could be used as the camera, while audio and video output is to a MacBook.
