Project
| # | Title | Team Members | TA | Documents | Sponsor |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 46 | Low-Cost Head-Tracking Headphones |
Cary Zhu Molly Fane Sally Zhou |
Zhen Qin | design_document3.pdf final_paper1.pdf presentation1.pptx proposal1.pdf |
|
| Description: The goal of this project is to design and build a small device capable of attaching to and augmenting an existing pair of over-the-ear headphones, in order to give the wearer the ability to track the orientation of the head in real time. Broadly, the goal of this project stems from the fact that normal headphones do not track head orientation; when the listener rotates their head in real-life, sensory input to the brain changes, and a perceptual experience of space occurs. When listening to music on normal headphones while rotating the head, no such perceptual experience occurs. The ability to track head orientation with headphones opens new possibilities for experiencing customized sounds in a more immersive, exciting, and realistic way. This project idea comes from Professor Eli Fieldsteel of the music department, who would like to compose ambisonic musical work using electronic sounds. Project Uniqueness and Hardware Complexity: It is acknowledged that technology for head orientation-tracking headphones is fairly well developed already, as exemplified by various VR hardware-software paradigms. The goal of this project is to create a simplified, budget-friendly, non-software-specific version that others with non-specialized skills can replicate by following a simple article/manual that will follow the project. Professor Fieldsteel’s Comments: “Appreciating that other interested members of the DIY community may not have access to the same resources as ECE 445 students, it is desirable to produce two versions of the augmented headphones: one with substantial circuitry-building work that is small and somewhat specialized with PCB and soldered connections, and another version that relies more heavily on pre-build components that are affordably available through commercial sites, as a way of making this technology more broadly available to the novice electronic music composition community.” Software Components: Ambisonic sound refers to a mathematical framework for handling true three-dimensional sound placement and positioning. The composer will be using the Ambisonic Tool Kit (ATK) running in the SuperCollider audio programming language (http://www.ambisonictoolkit.net/) Many of the generators, spatializers, and other software tools in the ATK rely on angle values in radians in order to modify the orientation of a three-dimensional sound field. In particular, the FoaRTT object (http://doc.sccode.org/Classes/FoaRTT.html) will be a focal point in creating the musical composition. The data output by the device should align with the requirements of FoaRTT and other Ambisonic UGens, if possible, e.g. providing three values for rotational angles about the x, y, and z axes. System Description: The augmented headphones should output data at a refresh rate that is appropriately high, at least 30 Hz, preferably 60 Hz or even higher. The device should also be able to be calibrated such that an arbitrary angle within the horizontal plane will be considered to be “front-facing”, perhaps by the inclusion of a small button. The professor’s current prototype is capable of tracking azimuth angle on the horizontal plane, with no means of calibration; the magnetometer uses compass north as an absolute reference point. Using the accelerometer to track elevation angle is as a goal of the project. References: For reference, “Audeze Mobius 3D Headphones” are one example of high-end, software-specific orientation-tracking headphones (https://www.waves.com/hardware/audeze-mobius-3d-headphones-360-ambisonics-tools) which the project seeks to re-engineer, though with great emphasis on budget-friendliness, DIY-friendliness, non-specificity of receiving software, and simplification of output data streams. |
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