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Comment by agloeregrets | Hacker News Reader

For one thing, Apple has a custom Dolby Atmos Implementation on their headphones that ties the accelerometers in the AirPods to detect head position and then adjust sound strength to places where you turn your head. Supposedly when watching movies with Atmos or 7.1 it's incredibly immersive. They just announced their new iMac with 'Atmos' (I want to see how this works) as well however. You probably could connect over HDMI as you state.

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It sounds like a genuinely good idea for movies, but only for VR, right? How often do you turn your head while watching a regular movie?

All the time. Humans don't stay still. We move our heads regularly, where even small movements help our audiovisual spatial sense.

It's just that our consciousness ignores these little movements and so we think we're largely still.

Yup. It’s like the fact that your eyes heck all over and I believe slightly vibrate in order to sample from slightly different positions to improve image quality.

Yeah, our eyesight is not very good without that saccade motion.

Below some movement threshold you go completely blind in just a few seconds.

One of the standard stare-at-the-dot-machine optometry tests is enough to make my vision start to gray out.

Yeah, your body adjusts to stimulus very quickly to minimize it.

Have you tried watching an Atmos/7.1 channels movie with the AirPods that support this?

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