Your mobile user experience will soon be available in SurroundSound, says NTT DoCoMo.
That\'s the idea behind \'mobile spatial audio transmission technology\', which DoCoMo says allows a mobile phone user to assign a spatial position to different sound sources during apps like games or conference calls. Put on some headphones, and game characters coming from the left side of your iPhone (or, in this case, your DoCoMo PRO series HT-01A handset) will come from that direction, or the people in your conference call will sound as though they\'re standing on either side of you.
DoCoMo didn\'t invent the idea so much as make it more efficient for mobile. Existing spatial audio transmission technologies process audio encoding/decoding and spatial audio synthesis independently, but DoCoMo says its technology integrates the processing in a client/server set-up, which saves on both bit-rates and computation speed on the mobile device.