We hear a lot about product roadmaps from equipment manufacturers. But rarely do these roadmaps extend more than a year or two into the future – a reality that has arisen in part because in today’s competitive environment, companies can’t afford to spend time or resources on the pie-in-the-sky puttering that used to be the stock in trade for organizations like Bell Labs (News - Alert) or Xerox PARC and which on numerous occasions, yielded technologies that eventually were commercially successful.

Once in a while, though, I run across a company that seems to be thinking more than a year or two ahead – and it’s always refreshing when that happens.

I had that sort of encounter recently when I got an invitation from Sennheiser Electronics to see the “David Bowie Is” exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago and to get a look at the underlying audio technology, not yet on the market, with which Sennheiser has been experimenting.

3-D Sound

One of the technologies is 3-D sound. Sennheiser uses an array of nine speakers at prescribed heights and distances from each other to create an experience that makes recorded material sound as if it is being performed in the room. Perhaps more impressively, the company has developed an algorithm that it can use on previously recorded material to repurpose the material for playback on the nine-speaker system. The algorithm can be used on material originally recorded using earlier 3-D technologies or even in stereo – and some decades-old Bowie material was given the treatment for the exhibit.

Robert Genereux, business director for Sennheiser Electronics’ application engineering group, did a comparison demo for the press, and the 3-D sound was considerably more lifelike than the same material in stereo.

Location Technology

Another Sennheiser technology, also used in the Bowie exhibit, makes the exhibit unlike any other you may have experienced in the past.

Everyone attending gets a headset to wear while walking through the exhibit but it’s not the kind that plays a pre-recorded tour, thereby determining the pace at which the user experiences the exhibit. Instead the headset uses technology that recognizes the wearer’s location within the exhibit and streams audio to the wearer that matches what he or she is seeing. This lets visitors move through at their own pace.

And while the curators could simply have played different audio content in different parts of the exhibit, the headset eliminates the problem that typically accompanies that approach -- in certain parts of the exhibit visitors would have had the unpleasant experience of hearing two different audio streams at the same time.

Genereux avoided providing details about how the location technology works, other than to note that it isn’t what is typically referred to as “indoor location” technology, but it is based on some type of sensor.

The Future?

Sennheiser’s 3-D audio technology won’t be commercially feasible until the company devises a way to convert ordinary MP3s or CDs on the fly – and the company isn’t making any predictions about when that might happen. A Sennheiser spokesperson did note, though, that the company has a “very active research team focused on 3-D audio in its San Francisco lab.”

As for Sennheiser’s location technology, when I asked Genereux about commercial applications he said the company sees museums as its only customers for that technology. Although he didn’t elaborate on why the company sees it that way, I can only assume the cost would be too high for other applications that might come to mind, such as delivering or collecting marketing information in retail outlets.

As with any technology though, I would expect costs to eventually decline over time. Perhaps within the five- to 10-year timeframe that so many of us find it difficult to make predictions about, we’ll see one or both of Sennheiser’s advanced technologies on the market – and perhaps someday we will even see them embedded in mobile phones. We’re already seeing a market emerge for smartphones with high-end cameras built in. If Sennheiser eventually can get the price right, perhaps a market will also emerge for smartphones with built-in high-end audio.