One of the world’s largest military contractors, Raytheon, has developed a system that gives soldiers superhuman hearing. The system, called 3-D Audio, essentially allows soldiers to hear exactly where threats are coming from, and what kind of threat it is — a rocket, gunfire, a Molotov cocktail — just like Marvel Comics’ Daredevil’s radar sense.
If this sounds a bit like your home entertainment’s surround sound system, or your fancy pair of 7.1 surround sound headphones, you’re not wrong. In essence, Raytheon has built the mother of all directional sound setups. As with most military gadgets, exact specifications are hard to come by, but it sounds like 3-D Audio will feature a lot of small, highly-directional speakers. ”Pilots for years have been listening to three or four radios, and when two people would talk at the same time, it would just come across garbled,” says Todd Lovell, a Raytheon engineer. “With the 3-D Audio, we can put those radios in different spatial locations relative to your head.”
At the moment, a military plane or helicopter pilot receives warnings and notifications through a visual display, either in the center of the cockpit or on a head-up display (HUD). Processing this information takes time and distracts the pilot from the task at hand: maneuvering the aircraft. Throw in a bunch of radios, plus chatter from the co-pilot, all coming through the same speakers, and you can begin to imagine the difficulty of piloting a helicopter in a military setting. With 3D-Audio, all of these audio streams are split up into individual, spatially-separated channels that the pilot can tune into — a bit like picking out a single conversation in a crowded room. “You always hear them from where they actually are,” says J.D. Hill, another Raytheon engineer. “You don’t have to interpret anything. It’s all just about reaction and what you hear.”
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