#HTE

Designing 3D Sound: Ossic X wants to change how you hear

One of the coolest parts of living in a VR-ready era is watching the emergence of other surprising tech that will make immersive experiences way more believable. The new smart headphone company OSSIC X has thrown its weight behind one of the most recent and exciting frontiers: three-dimensional audio. 

While technically nuanced to realize, the idea is so natural it’s surprising it hasn’t been more in demand, but now that it’s out there, it’s pretty much blowing up.

In short: these headphones adapt audio and its delivery to your head, so you interact with sound like you would in a real environment. 

Sound is a massive part of how we experience our favorite media, from addictive game environments to lush, beautifully produced music. But so far getting a 3D sonic experience is largely limited to those of us with multi speaker setups. Adding more directionality and lifelike surround right inside headphones could deeply change how we interact with recorded sound.

The experience of sound is physically personal. This isn’t just due to the individual health of our inner ear workings–the outer shape and even side-to-side distance of our ears affects the distortion and perception of everything we hear. By accounting for each of those parts, Ossic has attempted to make recorded audio more individually deliverable, and more spatially realistic. 

To do it they use HRTF input to gauge the distance between your ears, a multi-driver array to split sound around each ear, and integrated head tracking, which combine to give a lifelike sense of depth and surroundedness. The Ossic headphones feature adjustable ear cups, durable material choices, a 10-hour battery life, standard connectivity, a boom mic, and super simple form.

While audio tech can be a dry field, their years of passionate R&D seem to have paid off. They’re working with THX on audio quality and Abbey Road Red. And the campaign for these things has been blown far, far out of the water with huge campaign support and developer interest. 

All in all, 3D sound has a ton of potential. It’s ripe and ready for use in VR environments and for better spacial awareness in gaming, and it can give recorded music a more intimate quality, and make at home cinema feel a lot more intense. No matter the platform you encounter sound through, if you increase the sense of space and things in it, and you increase the your ability to lose yourself in that space.