LovelyVirus
4 HN recommenders · recommended in 11 months, 2013–2024
4:41 · 43M views · May 5, 2007
A binaural audio demo, the 'Virtual Barber Shop', that places a barber moving around your head. It works best with headphones and closed eyes.
It is the classic demo HN people point to for showing positional 3D audio working on ordinary headphones.
13 comments from Hacker News
Here's a classic "OMG I can hear him moving around" recording that works with the cheapest of headphones: this video Most of the audio experience quality comes out of the production phase, and artists can put as much or little effort into that as possible and consider several mediums of listening (headphones, TV, surround, concert, vinyl) and make tradeoffs for the medium's particular experience. I don't know about double blind trials but people do tests on their own. It's further complicated though because the hardware you use could be optimized for certain types of music, e.g. have a read through [LINK]
60 Virtual speakers What does that even mean? It sounds like clever marketing talk. I bet they have just regular stereo and software. Here, take a pair of good stereo headphones and try this 3d demo. And don't forget to close your eyes. Virtual barber shop: this video
Because it adds another dimension to the sound you're experiencing and gives you a whole new appreciation for the medium. This combined with binaural audio should be the future of audio storytelling. Give this a try with any normal headphone: this video
> I wonder how much people can see in the dark through listening to sound sources by moving their heads for motion parallax. Listen to this with headphones: this video It’s amazing how much you can geolocate just in even a recording.
Dedicated soundcard, and drivers with direct access to hardware have nothing to do with audio professionals. It is about processors on the card (that back then had about half of the amount of transistors that the PC main CPU had, so they could pack quite a punch in processing power) that could do realtime audio calculations. I am not talking just about "effects" from the audio professional sense, I am talking about realtime creation of audio according to the scene geometry and stuff happening, for example A3D could calculate actual reflections, not just simulated reverb/echo. If you want to see an example of this in real life: go near a window that has a barrier in front of it of some kind, in a relatively enclosed space. Then wait for some noise to happen outside, in the direction opposite to the window. Suppose you was facing "forward", the window (and the wall beyond it) is to your left. Then an airplane passes by your right. The naive way to do it (that is what most games today do without a soundcard to do it for them), is play sound from the right speaker (be it in a 5.1 or in the right speaker of a headphone), or to simulate it is "outside", play it muffled. The correct way to do it, is play from the left, because it reflected on the wall, and came inside through the window. Vortex soundcards for example, made by Aureal, could calculate that (back then, only one reflection, so sequences of reflections that could go around corners didn't worked, but back then was 1996, t