Motion-tracked binaural sound

If your 7.1 speaker system just isn't cutting it you'll be pleased to know that researchers at the UC Davis Interface Laboratory have developed something called motion-tracked binaural sound, which is the new top of the line in terms of making you feel as if you're in the room with whatever you're listening to. It ups the ante on traditional binaural sound (which records sound through mics in a dummy head) by upping the number of mics to eight for voice and sixteen for music. Once they've got all this sound data a motion tracker attached to your headphones determines which way you're looking and mixes the sound accordingly, as if you were actually in the room. The best part is that the parts are (relatively) cheap. They're planning on using this technology for live music recordings (we should hope so), teleconferencing, virtual/augmented reality and, thankfully, video games.

[Via BoingBoing]