mary-spioMary Spio is the president and founder of Next Galaxy, and she’s working on a number of different VR experiences including music videos, medical training, and enterprise applications. They’re also developing the Ceekars 4D Headphones in order to increase the immersion from audio. They’ve included haptic feedback on the ears and band of the headphones in order to do things like amplify the feeling of wind blowing or a passing train. Mary loves going to concerts, and so she’s channelling her passion for music into the virtual reality experiences that she’d like to have. Next Galaxy is working with some heavy metal bands and talks more about how she sees that VR could help increase the engagement and distribution of music for bands who adopt the technology.

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Kent Bye
  • Don Gateley

    Typical IndieGoGo snake oil. Late with no recent estimation of delivery date. Be sure and try these in a store or from a source like Amazon where they can be returned when they don’t live up to the claims.

  • Don Gateley

    BTW, Kent. It would be friendly if crowd sourced items were so indicated in and at the front of articles. Crowd sourcing has become a den of thieves and not worth a click through.

  • AJ@VRSFX

    The haptics sounded similar to other haptic solutions, though I’m not sold on whether I’d pay for haptics on my head unless I tried it first.

    I’m became skeptical about the audio playback itself. She said her 4D includes 3D audio plus haptics. I get what they’re doing with haptics, but how are they rendering the audio in 3D? I’ve heard of several potential solutions to do 3D audio via hardware. I have yet to hear one that’s not impossibly impractical. Even if it does work, as she said, “as a content creator we don’t have to worry about this plugin and that plugin […] because we’re able to do the rendering on the hardware itself.”

    In other words, the headphones work great when listening to her team’s in-house content, but nobody else’s content. Sounds like it’s impossible for third parties to use Ceekars to render good 3D audio in their apps, since there is no plugin or SDK. Every third party app will have el zilcho 3D audio through those headphones. Headphones that only work for certain apps… not a buy in my book.

    She talked about having an SDK for room reflections? Skipping a 3D spatialization SDK and going straight to a reflection SDK? That doesn’t make sense. I don’t care about room reflections if you can’t render my audio in 3D first. In fact, all the current plugins have trouble rendering reflections efficiently at all (bc reflections are very processor-intense) so… they’re going to do that in the headphones? Do that have an APU in the headphones? How heavy is that? Does it need it’s own power source? This stuff doesn’t seem to add up unless there’s some info she didn’t get to.

    “We’re taking original uncompressed files and creating an enhanced experience.” Again, this refers only to haptics, I think, since it is impossible to take existing stereo or surround sound mixes from older movies/games and render them in 3D automatically. This is my biggest worry with audio hardware aimed at the VR community. A lot of headphones are pitched as though they can render your audio in 3D automatically, when in actually none of them are capable of doing so out of the box.