zach-jaffeIt was on a San Jose sidewalk in 2015 that I first tried the SubPac and felt like I was immediately transported into a dance club standing in front of giant subwoofers with the soundwaves of bass rippling through my body, but yet no one around me could hear a thing. The magic of the SubPac is that it translates the inaudible frequencies lower than 40Hz into a vibrating haptic feedback that provides a much more immersive experience.

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I’ve seen a lot of different experiences at conferences over the past year using the SubPac to increase immersion, and I was able to catch up with business developer Zach Jaffe at VRLA to hear about some of their content partnerships and new S2 Backback. We talk about some of the VR experiences and songs that have good low frequency bass design that specifically take the SubPac into consideration. We also talk about the future of immersive sound design, and his prediction that music labels will want to remix albums to work well within spatialized audio environments.

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See Also: Hands-on: 4 Experimental Haptic Feedback Systems at SIGGRAPH 2016

There isn’t a spatialized audio open standard yet, and so the music industry is waiting to see what formats emerge. At the moment, a fully immersive VR experience is the best option to get full audio spatialization, but a yet-to-be determined, standard format for object-oriented or spatialized audio could be used with head-tracked headphones like Ossic X as well as with future versions of SubPac devices that have directional bass incorporated.

Here’s a number of VR experiences and music videos that are SubPac-optimized (though the unit works well even with experiences that aren’t designed for it):

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And some music videos which work well:

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Music: Fatality & Summer Trip

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Kent Bye
  • Andrew Jakobs

    Using Bass speaker stuck to your body isn’t anything new, far from it, I still have one laying around from begin 90’s..

    • Mike Handles

      Cool story Andrew, which VR headset does it work with?

      • Andrew Jakobs

        all..

  • mellott124

    Aura Interactor is on Amazon for less than $20. Does the same thing.