2024-05-05 14:00:10
Soon no more annoying voice instructions like “in 50 meters, turn left… Take this street 100 meters to the right…” that interfere in your ears to the point of disturbing you? Welcome to musical pedestrian guidance! Thanks to head movement sensors (« head tracking ») integrated into headphones, connected glasses or smart earbuds, spatial sound – called “binaural” – allows you to indicate the direction to follow regardless of the orientation of your head.
You listen to your favorite music: from now on, let yourself be guided by it. This is the bet launched by the French start-up RunBlind, born in 2020 within the fold of the Ecole Polytechnique (at the Drahi X-Novation Center, Patrick Drahi being the godfather) and specializing in binaural sound.
Read also | Article reserved for our subscribers Immersive sound, a new challenge for the music industry to seduce spectators and listeners
Add to your selections
According to research engineer Sylvain Ferrand and mathematics professor François Alouges behind RunBlind technology, “Binaural sound is to hearing what 3D vision glasses are to sight, that is to say, it allows you to virtually recreate 3D sound.” From tourism to museums, including sports or daily life activities, dynamic 3D binaural spatial sound for guidance – a sort of augmented audio – could appeal to a general public, particularly the visually impaired or blind.
Dynamic 3D sound
But dynamic 3D audio guidance has yet to find its market. Marketing under paid license has just started with mobile application publishers (navigation) and device manufacturers (audio equipment). “In recent years, several brands have introduced standard Bluetooth headphones equipped with sensors. Thanks to these, the use of our 3D sound technology is made possible dynamically, compensating for head movements. Which is very useful when you want to be guided in daily life”explains Philippe Le Borgne, CEO and co-founder of RunBlind.
This dynamic 3D sound technology is also offered to publishers of navigation applications so that they can provide the sound guidance function. “The RunBlind engine dynamically spatializes any sound by positioning it towards the direction to follow. We render it in mono to position it exactly on the trajectory,” specifies Philippe Le Borgne.
Read also | Article reserved for our subscribers “Spatial sound will help support the film industry”
Add to your selections
The young Polytechnique startup has not yet appealed for fundraising, but it has already benefited from several support for its financing (in particular from the French Tech Emergence Stock Exchange of Bpifrance). She was also a winner of competitions, including the European Horizon 2020 program, and the i-Lab innovation competition of the France 2030 plan. Dynamic guidance, made possible by nomadic binaural sound, has a bright future.
#sound #guide