Can this be used like a phased array?
High-quality OLED displays now enabling integrated thin and multichannel audio
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Re: High-quality OLED displays now enabling integrated thin and multichannel audio
#72Would the vibration be detectable via touch? It would be wild to integrate this into haptics
Audi somewhat did this with the display in the Q8 E-Tron. I don’t recall if the display is OLED, but it has excellent haptics.
How does it work? You force press (remember 3d touch?) when you find item you after?
Re: High-quality OLED displays now enabling integrated thin and multichannel audio
#73This is impressive. Though perhaps not very useful. Humans (and animals in general) are quite bad at precisely locating sound anyway. We only have two input channels, the right and the left ear, and any location information comes from a signal difference (loudness usually) between the two.
You are misinformed. Amplitude, spectral, and timing are all integrated into a positional / distance probability mapping. Humans can estimate the vector of a sound by about 2 degrees horizontal and 4 degrees vertical. Distance is also pretty accurate, especially in a room where direct and reflected sounds will arrive at different times, creating interference patterns. The brain processes audio in a way not too dissim…
> Humans can estimate the vector of a sound by about 2 degrees horizontal and 4 degrees vertical.
Yet I'm usually not even noticing whether a video has stereo or mono sound. So I highly doubt that ultra precise OLED loudspeakers would make a noticeable difference.
Re: High-quality OLED displays now enabling integrated thin and multichannel audio
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not niche at all. You could have a phone for example that plays sounds from areas of the screen where they originate. Key presses, buttons, notification pop ups, etc.
You missed (or didn't address, at any rate) my point. For a phone where all audio channels are in between both ears (or even worse, held off to the right/left of both ears) with only a minute difference in the angle of the arc to each of the binaural inputs, convince me that you can reasonably distinguish between sounds emanating from different locations (facing the same direction - not at all like a speaker pointing…
With enough speakers coupled on the order of the wavelength of the sound (and for most frequencies, these seem like they will be), you can use beamforming to aim different sounds in different directions from a single source, with speakers facing in only one direction.
For an extreme example of this, refer to the Sphere, where they can target sounds at individual audience members from any arbitrary direction using speakers in the surround display.
Re: High-quality OLED displays now enabling integrated thin and multichannel audio
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
Audi somewhat did this with the display in the Q8 E-Tron. I don’t recall if the display is OLED, but it has excellent haptics.
How does it work? You force press (remember 3d touch?) when you find item you after?
It’s fully capacitive with a magnetic resonance actuator, there didn’t seem to be any force inputs nor simulated force with touch radius. The touch input is very responsive.
Re: High-quality OLED displays now enabling integrated thin and multichannel audio
#76Can this be used like a phased array?
Interesting, I bought a parametric speaker (from Kickstarter of all places [1]), it too uses piezoelectric emitters.
My understanding: DML speakers directly emit audible sound by vibrating at the resonance frequency of a material. Parametric speakers emit ultrasonic waves and control how those waves interfere using phased-array techniques, the interference is what produces sound.
It produces completely different results compared to DML: The sound quality is not good, interference just can't produce the full spectrum of audible frequencies.
In return, you gain extreme control over directionality: the interference only happens in midair or when the ultrasonic waves hits something solid, the speaker itself is mostly silent. It's actually "too directional" for me to use, the beam is still audible after multiple bounces off of solid objects: I was hoping to use it in a office as a sort of "personal speaker", but after the beam strikes my head and I hear sound, a part of it is reflected and bounces off the ceiling and floor repeatedly, causing the speaker to be audible at the opposite end of the floor.
[1] https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1252022192/focusound-th...
Re: High-quality OLED displays now enabling integrated thin and multichannel audio
#77Would the vibration be detectable via touch? It would be wild to integrate this into haptics
A laptop improvement I'd love would be a haptic keyboard. You could then make the entire laptop waterproof as well as do keyboard reconfiguration for certain tasks. I always though Apple's Touch Bar was some kind of entry point into that idea but it wasn't, wasn't useful, and just died.
Wouldn't it be pretty miserable to actually type on? Not that laptop keyboards are usually very good.
Re: High-quality OLED displays now enabling integrated thin and multichannel audio
#78So you are saying we get dieplays that could run wavefield synthesis? If you don't know what wavefield synthesis is: you basically have an array of evenly spaced speakers and for each virtual sound source you drive each individual speaker with a specially delayed signal that recreates the wavefield a sound source would create if it occupied that space. This is basically as close as you can get to the thing being in a…
Because audio runs at such low sample rates, it's not exorbitant by current standards. Suppose you have an 8×16 array of speakers behind your screen, each running at 96ksps. That's only 12.3 million samples per second to generate, on the order of 200 million multiply-accumulates per second for even the most extreme scenarios. Lattice's iCE40UP5K FPGA https://www.farnell.com/datasheets/3215488.pdf#page=10 contains 8 "…
I wasn't thinking of a 16x8 array, I was thinking of an 160x80 array. Spacing your speakers too closely will have diminishing returns, but it depends on the frequency to which you want to operate. If we assume a frequency of 20kHz you should space your speakers at half the wavelength to avoid spatial aliasing artifacts, so something like a speaker every 8mm. This is especially important if the listener position is close.
This means 13000 precise delay lines multiplied with the number of virtual sound sources you want to allow for at the same time let's assume 64. At a sampling rate of 48kHz that means 39x10⁹ Samples per second. That isn't nothing, especially for a consumer device and if we assume the delay values for each of the virtual source-speaker combinations needs to be adjusted on the fly.
Re: High-quality OLED displays now enabling integrated thin and multichannel audio
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because audio runs at such low sample rates, it's not exorbitant by current standards. Suppose you have an 8×16 array of speakers behind your screen, each running at 96ksps. That's only 12.3 million samples per second to generate, on the order of 200 million multiply-accumulates per second for even the most extreme scenarios. Lattice's iCE40UP5K FPGA https://www.farnell.com/datasheets/3215488.pdf#page=10 contains 8 "…
I wasn't thinking of a 16x8 array, I was thinking of an 160x80 array. Spacing your speakers too closely will have diminishing returns, but it depends on the frequency to which you want to operate. If we assume a frequency of 20kHz you should space your speakers at half the wavelength to avoid spatial aliasing artifacts, so something like a speaker every 8mm. This is especially important if the listener position is cl…
Hmm, I see. I think that you can cheat quite a bit more than that, though, if your objective is only to fool human hearing (as your 48ksps and 20kHz numbers suggest): the humans can only use phase information to detect the directionality of sound up to a few hundred Hz, relying entirely on amplitude attenuation above that, presumably because their neurons run too slow. But maybe your objective is sonar beamforming or something.
Re: High-quality OLED displays now enabling integrated thin and multichannel audio
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
A laptop improvement I'd love would be a haptic keyboard. You could then make the entire laptop waterproof as well as do keyboard reconfiguration for certain tasks. I always though Apple's Touch Bar was some kind of entry point into that idea but it wasn't, wasn't useful, and just died.
Wouldn't it be pretty miserable to actually type on? Not that laptop keyboards are usually very good.
I tried a prototype continuous feedback haptic keyboard once. You could feel the “keys”. Took getting used to but it wasn’t bad. It basically tricks your senses into thinking there is something three dimensional there.
I wonder if power consumption is a problem. That requires constant energy use. There’s also been problems with them emitting a faint sound, since you’re creating vibrations.