6
votes
AirPods with camera modules to reportedly enter mass production in 2026, will be designed to deliver an enhanced spatial audio experience
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- Authors
- Omar Sohail
- Published
- Jun 30 2024
- Word count
- 398 words
Oh fuck off - maybe I'm neurotic about this stuff, but what aspect of the audio environment requires video recording? Seems like a data gathering exercise for hungry content companies late to the AI scene to me.
I know Apple is currently putting a lot of their energy into the Vision Pro, so I wouldn’t be surprised if these cameras are for essentially measuring and compensating for the 3D space around you in order to artificially emulate VR environments (e.g. adjusting sounds on the fly as you move your head, so that it seems like a virtual sound source is fixed in space)
The particular example I made up could also be done with accelerometers inside the headphones, but I suspect the level of precision accelerometers compact enough to fit in an AirPod would be more expensive (dollars and computationally) than an infrared camera/lidar thing
That's a great interpretation. Seeing how different companies are approaching inside-out tracking in VR has been super interesting so far.