Leaning back in a comfortable seat, following an exciting story on the screen, letting the enveloping sound draw you into the action – that's cinema! Now it's possible to transport this exact feeling into the car without disturbing the driver. With 31.3 inches, the 8K BMW Theatre Screen in the rear of the BMW 7 Series is the largest display in a serial car today and delivers a truly cinematic experience. And a fully spatial audio, or immersive sound experience is possible using headphones.
Conventional headphone playback can only partially represent the spatial dimension of an acoustic scene. This means that users usually perceive sounds in their head only, and not as if they were positioned in the environment, like in real life. Fraunhofer Cingo simulates a natural sound field in which virtual sound sources can be freely positioned. This adds a new spatiality to audio content while keeping it free from any unwanted sound coloring. Passengers can enjoy a sound image through their headphones that is as spatial as the one from the premium speaker system.
Cingo has been integrated into the built-in Fire TV operating system of the Rear Seat Entertainment Experience, which is now available across all models of the BMW 7 Series. The Fraunhofer technology provides headphone playback of stereo and 5.1 surround sound for streamed content on apps like Amazon Prime, Hulu, Netflix, and YouTube.
An interdisciplinary team of audio engineers, sound engineers and audio DSP experts from Fraunhofer IIS is continuously working on Cingo. The proven technology has already provided immersive sound playback for Google Nexus devices and Samsung Gear VR glasses.
In addition to stereo and surround content, Fraunhofer Cingo can also playback 3D audio content. The sound image is expanded by a third dimension – height. In addition, dynamic head tracking, meaning the mapping of a virtual scene to the listener's head movement, is supported with low latency.
Fraunhofer Cingo is available as a ready-to-use software implementation, for example for manufacturers of mobile devices and smart headphones, chip manufacturers, and providers of multimedia streaming services. Cingo can be integrated into audio DSPs in embedded systems thanks to its low complexity, for example as an Audio Weaver module.
www.iis.fraunhofer.de
