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High-quality OLED displays now enabling integrated thin and multichannel audio
- dedicate 1y agoMy mind immediately goes to VR – imagine how much more immersive that would be!
- globular-toast 1y agoSlight problem being you don't hear through your eyes.
- short_sells_poo 1y agoEasily solvable by a piece of bread soaked with a drop of lysergic acid diethylamide :D Ingest. Wait 30-60 minutes. Enjoy the ride.
- miguelnegrao 1y agoFor VR, since you have to put the helmet in your head, it is usually assumed users don't mind putting headphones as well, so most solutions are via headphone-based spatialization.
- walterbell 1y agoCould such a display also function as a microphone?
- GenshoTikamura 1y agoA proper telescreen is not the one you watch and listen to, but the one that watches you and listens to you, %little_brother%
- jdranczewski 1y agoGood point, piezos do also generate voltages when deformed, so this could conceivably be run in reverse... Microphone arrays are already used for directional sound detection, so this could have fun implications for that application given the claimed density of microphones.
- nine_k 1y agoWould a piezo crystal, mounted behind a screen and the glass panel atop it, have enough sensitivity to capture recognizable speech?
- spookie 1y agoIf you put a dualsense controller atop of glass and send sound through it to the back-left or back-right channels (controls the haptics) you definitely hear it, so I presume yes.
- Nevermark 1y agoYou could likely do both at the same time. The "microphone" would be the measurement of interference between speaker demand and actual response.
- orbital-decay 1y agoTechnically yes, piezo cells are reversible, just like about anything that can be used to emit sound. You can use the array for programmable directionality as well.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- tuukkah 1y ago> This breakthrough enables each pixel of an OLED display to simultaneously emit different sounds > The display delivers high-quality audio Are multiple pixels somehow combined to reproduce low frequencies?
- GenshoTikamura 1y agoTheoretically, any frequency can be produced by the interference of ultrasonic waves, but the amplitude is questionable, given that these emitters are embedded into a thin substrate.
- lmpdev 1y agoWould the vibration be detectable via touch? It would be wild to integrate this into haptics
- skhameneh 1y agoAudi somewhat did this with the display in the Q8 E-Tron. I don’t recall if the display is OLED, but it has excellent haptics.
- api 1y agoA laptop improvement I'd love would be a haptic keyboard. You could then make the entire laptop waterproof as well as do keyboard reconfiguration for certain tasks. I always though Apple's Touch Bar was some kind of entry point into that idea but it wasn't, wasn't useful, and just died.
- thfuran 1y agoWouldn't it be pretty miserable to actually type on? Not that laptop keyboards are usually very good.
- api 1y agoI tried a prototype continuous feedback haptic keyboard once. You could feel the “keys”. Took getting used to but it wasn’t bad. It basically tricks your senses into thinking there is something three dimensional there. I wonder if power consumption is a problem. That requires constant energy use. There’s also been problems with them emitting a faint sound, since you’re creating vibrations.
- cubefox 1y agoThis is impressive. Though perhaps not very useful. Humans (and animals in general) are quite bad at precisely locating sound anyway. We only have two input channels, the right and the left ear, and any location information comes from a signal difference (loudness usually) between the two.
- mjlm 1y agoLocalization of sound is primarily based on the time difference between the ears. Localization is also pretty precise, to within a few degrees under good conditions.
- user_7832 1y agoNit: time difference, phase difference, amplitude difference, and head related transfer function (HRTF) all are involved. Different methods for different frequency localisation. There's this excellent (German?) for website that lets you play around and understand these via demos. I’ll see if I can find it. Edit: found it, it’s https://www.audiocheck.net/audiotests_stereophonicsound.php https://www.audiocheck.net/audiotests_stereophonicsound.php
- cubefox 1y agoI think for stereo sound, media like music, TV, movies and video games use loudness difference instead of time difference to indicate location.
- badmintonbaseba 1y agoAt least video games use way more complex models for that, AFAIK. It might be tricky to apply to mixes of recorded media, so loudness is commonly used there.
- miguelnegrao 1y agoUnreal Engine, the only engine I'm more familiar with, implements VBAP which is just amplitude panning when played through loudspeakers for panning of 3D moving sources. It also allows Ambisonics recordings for ambient sound which is then decoded into 7.1. For headphone based spatialization (binaral synthesis) usually virtual Ambisonics fed into HRTF convolution is used, which is not amplitude based, specially height is encoded using spectral filtering. So loudspeakrs -> mostly amplitude based, headphones not amplitude based.
- steelbrain 1y agoThis is a long shot but anyone know if there's an audio recording of the sound the display produced? Curious Edit: Found it: https://advanced.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/advs.202414691 https://advanced.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/advs.20... Go to supporting information on that page and open up the mp4 files
- IanCal 1y agoGood find - the first video is a frequency sweep, video 2 has some music. Edit - I'm not sure that's the same thing? The release talks about pixel based sound, the linked paper is about sticking an array of piezoelectric speakers to the back of a display. edit 2- You're right, the press release is pretty poor at explaining this though. It is not the pixels emitting the sound. It's an array of something like 25 speakers arranged like pixels. https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1084704 https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1084704
- jasonjmcghee 1y agoThis is the article that should be the main link- though still an incredibly misleading named technology. But the current one is just wrong.
- 1970-01-01 1y agoThis technology literally sounds like a terrible idea. Why do I want to hear one drummer's drum over the others? https://advanced.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/action/downloadSupplement?doi=10.1002%2Fadvs.202414691&file=advs12189-sup-0003-VideoS2.mp4 https://advanced.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/action/downloadSupp...
- jtthe13 1y agoThat’s super impressive. I guess that would work for a notification speaker. But for full sound I have doubts about the low frequencies. I would assume you would need a woofer anyway in a home setting.
- timschmidt 1y agoThese are a thing: https://hackaday.com/2019/10/26/building-the-worlds-best-dml-speakers-for-under-115/ https://hackaday.com/2019/10/26/building-the-worlds-best-dml...
- SkyPuncher 1y agoI have built those for an outdoor space. They work surprisingly well for mids to highs
- toast0 1y agoYou could always have a separate speaker for low frequencies. Low frequency sound tends to be perceived with less of a directional component, so if you have nice directionality of the highs and a single source for the lows, that's pretty acceptable. Removing the need to handle highs might make it easier to put together a speaker for the lows in the confines of a modern flat screen.
- formerly_proven 1y agoMany TFT and OLED panels today can produce sound unintentionally based on screen contents. This is mostly noticeable with repeating horizontal lines, which tend to produce whining at some fraction of the line frequency. Likely electrostiction. This here seems to be about adding separate piezoelectric actuators to the display though, it doesn’t seem to use the panel itself. > by embedding ultra-thin piezoelectric exciters within the OLED display frame. These piezo exciters, arranged similarly to pixels, convert electrical signals into sound vibrations without occupying external space.
- amelius 1y agoCan the video and audio be controlled independently?
- atoav 1y agoSurely? Images play at <120Hz and sound requires you to run at or above the nyquist limit which for human hearing has the standard of 48kHz. So all AV systems run image and sound separately and thus you can affect them separately. (I assumed you assumed the changing colors displayed on the pixels with 120Hz somehow drive the sound which needs to change at 48000Hz) Anything but separate inputs makes no sense giving the magnitudes different frequencies at which it needs to be driven. Also, the color/brightness of a pixel does mean nothing for the sound.
- teekert 1y agoI guess there are limits, like a pixel should never move more then its size, or you limit resolution (at least from some angels). So deep basses are out of the question? It is getting very interesting, sound, possibly haptics. We already had touch of course, including fingerprint (and visuals of course). We are more and more able to produce richt sensory experiences for panes of glass.
- milesvp 1y agoYeah, I don’t know, I suspect you’re right. I know that 25 years ago there were big flat speakers thay drove sound with little holes. Those things could only handle high ends despite being very large themselves. But I know that with DSP you can treat an array of microphones as a single microphone, and the diameter of the array sort of dictates the size of the microphone. Speakers and mics tend to sort of be opposites, in that you can drive or be driven by either. For years I’ve wanted to build a wall of cheap speakers and experiment with this. I suspect I’d find out what we already know, which is to get deep frequencies you have to move a lot of air, and an array of small piezos can never move a lot of air… That said, it might matter a lot what the substrait was. If it was light and flexible, you could maybe get all the piezos to move it in a way to get a very deep frequency. You could probably get deeper frequncies than the power output of the piezos by taking advantage of the resonance frequency of the material. But you’d be stuck with that one frequency, and there’d be a tradeoff in response time
- ra120271 1y agoIt would be interesting to learn in time what this means for the durability of the display. Do the vibrations induce stresses that increase component failure? Also how differing parts of the screen can generate different sound sources to create a sound scape tailored for the person in front of the screen (eg laptop user)? Interesting tech to watch!
- _joel 1y agoI've got a Sony Bravia with similar technology for a few years now (it uses small actuators instead of generating from the oled itself, but the vibrations will be the same) and it's still sounding fantastic after daily use and a couple of moves.
- atoav 1y agoSo you are saying we get dieplays that could run wavefield synthesis? If you don't know what wavefield synthesis is: you basically have an array of evenly spaced speakers and for each virtual sound source you drive each individual speaker with a specially delayed signal that recreates the wavefield a sound source would create if it occupied that space. This is basically as close as you can get to the thing being in actual space. Of course the amount of delay lines and processing needed is exhorbitant and for a screen the limiting factor is the physical dimension of the thing, but if you can create high resulation 2D loudspeaker arrays that glow, you can also create ones that do not.
- kragen 1y agoBecause audio runs at such low sample rates, it's not exorbitant by current standards. Suppose you have an 8×16 array of speakers behind your screen, each running at 96ksps. That's only 12.3 million samples per second to generate, on the order of 200 million multiply-accumulates per second for even the most extreme scenarios. Lattice's iCE40UP5K FPGA https://www.farnell.com/datasheets/3215488.pdf#page=10 https://www.farnell.com/datasheets/3215488.pdf#page=10 contains 8 "sysDSP" blocks which can do two 8-bit multiply-accumulates per clock cycle at 50MHz even when pipelining is disabled, so 800 million per second. It's 2.1 by 2.5 mm and costs US$5 at Digi-Key. I'm not familiar with AVX, but I believe your four-core 2GHz AVX512 CPU can do 256 8-bit multiply-accumulates per cycle, five hundred thousand million per second, so we're talking about an exorbitant amount of computation that's 0.04% of your CPU.
- atoav 1y agoI wasn't thinking of a 16x8 array, I was thinking of an 160x80 array. Spacing your speakers too closely will have diminishing returns, but it depends on the frequency to which you want to operate. If we assume a frequency of 20kHz you should space your speakers at half the wavelength to avoid spatial aliasing artifacts, so something like a speaker every 8mm. This is especially important if the listener position is close. This means 13000 precise delay lines multiplied with the number of virtual sound sources you want to allow for at the same time let's assume 64. At a sampling rate of 48kHz that means 39x10⁹ Samples per second. That isn't nothing, especially for a consumer device and if we assume the delay values for each of the virtual source-speaker combinations needs to be adjusted on the fly.
- chris_engel 1y agoI wonder about the mentioned application in mobile devices. with mobile and tablet devices one usually has a very durable glass layer between the screen and the outside world - not sure if sound would ve able topass through that.
- kragen 1y agoThey just mounted the display on top of an array of piezo buzzers, is all. But it's true that that wouldn't work very well with an LCD.
- amelius 1y agoHow can this produce directional sound beams if there is a glass plate covering the display?
- pornel 1y agoProbably similar to antennas — using phase shifting and interference.
- layer8 1y agoThe talk about pixels is misleading. The research paper doesn't mention pixels. They attached a 3x3 array of piezoelectric elements (roughly 3 cm in diameter each) behind a 13" OLED panel (one picture also shows a 5x4 array), using a sturdy frame structure to minimize interference of acoustic vibrations between the 9 (or 20) elements of the array. Not to say that this isn't interesting, but it’s not display pixels emitting sound.
- Animats 1y agoRight. It's a way of putting speakers behind a display, which will probably be useful. This may improve bass response in laptops, because the speaker area is larger.
- charlie0 1y agoI would guess the bass is nonexistent here. Cool idea though.
- paulbgd 1y agoNot this but similar, Sony’s acoustic surface audio for their displays uses actuators behind the screen to vibrate it. it’s not crazy bass but I’d say it’s on par with regular built in tv/laptop speakers
- curtisszmania 1y ago[dead]
- ComputerGuru 1y agoSeems somewhat niche due to physics. When you are ten feet away from a screen (or even three), you can scarcely distinguish between audio emanating from the upper-left “pixel/voxel” (to give a new meaning to an old word) and from the bottom-right, let alone from two adjacent locations.
- russdill 1y agoIf you get enough, you might be able to do some really interesting things using it as a phased array
- deadbabe 1y agoNot niche at all. You could have a phone for example that plays sounds from areas of the screen where they originate. Key presses, buttons, notification pop ups, etc.
- ComputerGuru 1y agoYou missed (or didn't address, at any rate) my point. For a phone where all audio channels are in between both ears (or even worse, held off to the right/left of both ears) with only a minute difference in the angle of the arc to each of the binaural inputs, convince me that you can reasonably distinguish between sounds emanating from different locations (facing the same direction - not at all like a speaker pointing out the side of each phone!!) at a rate statistically distinguishable from chance.
- InitialLastName 1y agoWith enough speakers coupled on the order of the wavelength of the sound (and for most frequencies, these seem like they will be), you can use beamforming to aim different sounds in different directions from a single source, with speakers facing in only one direction. For an extreme example of this, refer to the Sphere, where they can target sounds at individual audience members from any arbitrary direction using speakers in the surround display.
- saltcured 1y ago
- Xss3 1y agoCan this be used like a phased array?
- nulld3v 1y agoInteresting, I bought a parametric speaker (from Kickstarter of all places [1]), it too uses piezoelectric emitters. My understanding: DML speakers directly emit audible sound by vibrating at the resonance frequency of a material. Parametric speakers emit ultrasonic waves and control how those waves interfere using phased-array techniques, the interference is what produces sound. It produces completely different results compared to DML: The sound quality is not good, interference just can't produce the full spectrum of audible frequencies. In return, you gain extreme control over directionality: the interference only happens in midair or when the ultrasonic waves hits something solid, the speaker itself is mostly silent. It's actually "too directional" for me to use, the beam is still audible after multiple bounces off of solid objects: I was hoping to use it in a office as a sort of "personal speaker", but after the beam strikes my head and I hear sound, a part of it is reflected and bounces off the ceiling and floor repeatedly, causing the speaker to be audible at the opposite end of the floor. [1] https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1252022192/focusound-the-see-thru-glass-directional-speaker https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1252022192/focusound-th...