5.1 and even 7.1 speaker systems offer us unparalleled surround sound and a totally unique experience. Unfortunately, they have never become a mass product among the general public, which continues to watch their series and movies while playing games with the speakers of a lifetime. At most we have seen in recent times how there are users who play with 2.1 systems to which they add a subwoofer or simply a sound bar, but by losing the rear and side speakers, well, they completely lose the surrounding environment. Well, one of the solutions could be speakers with an integrated camera. How does this concept work?
Beamforming, the key technology behind it all
The first thing we have to take into account is that we are not talking about conventional speakers to which a camera is simply attached, since the concept is much more complex than this, but at the same time it is something that once explained is simple to understand. The idea is to have an audio output device made up of several different speakers running at the same time. However, they would not all play the same sound, but variations of it like now:
- Play it at different frequencies.
- Create a latency over others.
- Play it at different volumes.
- Use audio cancellation.
The idea is none other than that each of these little speakers in the device has a little processor that can manipulate the audio as needed and in real time. The ultimate goal is none other than to generate a surround sound environment for the user through the different speakers that make up the scene and for the viewer to end up enjoying an apparently enveloping environment. However, this methodology requires knowing where the user is at all times in order to generate surround audio and that is where the concept of camera speakers comes in.
The future lies in camera speakers
What happens if we put a set of different cameras on a device? Well, not only can we capture on video, but in combination with a series of light time and IR cameras, we can calculate the distance of each object. Then, if we add the ability of computer vision to identify objects and people, then we can know where each user is at any moment in the room and, therefore, make the beamforming more precise thanks to the speakers with camera.
It is a solution that can be applied in the future to any device from the moment it is built with existing technology and is therefore easy to develop and deploy. While the speakers are a bit different, you don’t need any kind of technology that wasn’t previously available to achieve surround sound audio. It also doesn’t require the end user to end up building complex speaker sets and offers a much better experience than a classic sound bar or TV speaker set.
And speakers or sound bars with a camera are already available on the market, an example is the recently presented Razer Leviathan V2 Pro, whose images are the ones you can see in this article as decoration. A concept that we believe many other manufacturers would copy in order to give additional value to their products and that we will not only see in the form of speakers with cameras or sound bars, but also integrated into laptops, televisions, etc. Have we finally solved the problem of surround audio at home? we think so
