The father of MP3 announces his new major project

Equipped with an augmented reality sensor, this audio headset allows Brandenburg Labs to create a perfect illusion. © Brandenburg Labs

69-year-old German engineer Karlheinz Brandenburg is one of the co-creators of the MP3 format which, in the 1990s and 2000s, revolutionized the way we consume music. music. Today, he is still active and he even has a new major project, still in the field of audio, which he presented at CES 2024.

Karlheinz Brandenburg is the CEO of Brandenburg Labs which, during the tech show in Las Vegas, presented new immersive audio technology. In recent years, tech players have been pushing a technology they call spatial audio. Spatial audio makes you feel like the sound of music, movies, or videos is coming from all directions. And some products, like the AirPods Pro 2 headphones, even have sensors that track head movements to make the sound even more realistic.

Better than spatial audio?

But Brandenburg Labs wants to take the audio experience to the next level and says it has developed a “never before seen” immersive system, or a “perfect illusion”. Our colleagues from Tom’s Guide were able to test this system at the company’s stand during CES in Las Vegas. They explain that the demonstration relies on the Vive Tracker sensor, a technology developed by HTC for mixed reality, to have precise information on the room where the user is, and on their movements. Thanks to this precise information, Brandenburg Labs would be able to offer an ultra-realistic audio experience. Tom's guide explains that in essence, it's a kind of “more” (more realistic) spatial audio that the company has developed.

Perfect for l& #8217;AR/VR

For its part, the Soundguys site explains that unlike Bose or Apple's spatial audio with head movement tracking, the Brandenburg Labs demonstration is more precise and adjusts depending on the location of the head. user in a room. Thus, the user has the impression that the sound is not coming from a headset, but from the outside, even when he moves.
For the moment, the commercialization of this technology is not is not yet mentioned. But in any case, it could have interesting applications in the fields of augmented reality and virtual reality.

“The new system delivers a whole new level of performance with immersive experiences never before heard for listeners. The Audio AR system allows real acoustic environments to be recreated through headphones for a new realistic listening experience where virtual sound is seamlessly integrated into users' lives, bridging the gap between the real and digital worlds”, we can read in the company's announcement.

• Karlheinz Brandenburg, co-creator of the MP3 format, now runs a laboratory specializing in immersive audio
• At CES in Las Vegas, this laboratory presented a new technology similar to spatial audio which offers a whole new level of realism
• This technology could be exploited to render the audio experience on virtual reality or augmented reality products more immersive

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