Concert Viewing Headphones

We designed concert viewing headphones that let a user listening and watching to music scope a particular part of the performance that he or she wants to hear and see. The headphones are equipped with a projector, an inclination sensor on the top of the headphones, and a distance sensor on the outside right speaker. For example, when listening to jazz, one might want to clearly hear and see the guitar or sax. By moving your head left or right, you can hear from a frontal position. By simply putting your hand behind your ear, you can adjust the distance sensor on the headphones and focus on a particular part you want to hear and see. Previously reported headphones with sensors for detecting the direction the user is facing or the location of the head can escalate the musical presence and create a realistic impression, but they do not control the volumes and panoramic potentiometers of each part in accordance with the user’s wishes. We previously developed sound scope headphones that enable users to change the sound mixing depending on their head direction. However, the system did not have handle images. The concert viewing headphones have both image and sound processing functions. The image processing extracts the portion of the image indicated by the user and projects it free of distortion on walls located to the front and side of the user. The sound processing creates imaginary microphones for those performers without one so that the user can hear the sound from any performer. Testing using images and sounds captured with a fisheye-lens camera and 37 lavalier microphones showed that sound localization was fastest when an inverse square function was used for the sound mixing and that the zoom function was useful for locating the desired sound performance.

Masatoshi Hamanaka
University of Tsukuba

Seunghee Lee
University of Tsukuba