Redmond Shows Off Cure for Teleconferencing Headaches at TechFest 2009
Redmond Shows Off Cure for Teleconferencing Headaches at TechFest 2009
Posted 02/25/2009 at 7:55pm
| by Mark Edward Soper
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If you've ever been subjected to a babel of echoing voices during a teleconference, Microsoft Research is working on a solution. As demonstrated (link requires Microsoft Silverlight) at this week's TechFest, MR's audio spatialization project enables a PC with stereo speakers to spatially separate different members of a teleconference. Audio spatialization's been used for years in 3D gaming, but Microsoft Research has added a new twist: to make it work for teleconferencing, it's also added echo cancellation. As researcher Zhengyou Zhang puts it:
Audio spatialization uses speakers to create the illusion that call attendees have different locations spatially. This allows you to use the audio sense you already have, that you normally use in conversation, to isolate who you’re talking to, and to associate a location in space with a particular individual... In a conference where there are multiple voices coming out of multiple speakers, it becomes important to eliminate the echoes that might naturally occur.
See it for yourself, then hit comment and sound off.
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Greymouse
March 10, 2009 at 9:02pm
It will be intresting to see how widely this gets implemented. It sounds like a good addtion to teleconference systems.
It would only work when someone is connected using a stereo speaker system.
and most current teleconference systems are not stereo speaker systems.
(I use a plantronics headset through a softphone to connect into my teleconferences)We are starting to see some new hardware coming out that supports surround sound, but there is a lot of existing technology that this wont work for.
It would probably work best if used on webinars VS VoIP Telephone systems.One thing to keep in mind is that it would now be transmitting stereo voice and increasing the data costs.
Clint Davis
Greymouse Teleconference - Australian Teleconferencing Service
pofarrell
February 25, 2009 at 8:25pm
Interesting that Micrsoft Research has been looking at this.
In fact it is already a techniiqe in operation in Cisco's Telepresence teleconferencing suites.
Marcus_Soperus
February 26, 2009 at 4:46am
Cisco's solution is a fairly costly one, ranging in price from $35K to as much as $59K. It will be interesting to see if Microsoft can use this research to bring out a much less expensive teleconferencing product suitable for a wider range of companies. If they can bring it to market quickly and at a reasonable price, it could be very useful in this time of economic uncertainty.
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