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Comment by spankalee | Hacker News Reader

I've always wanted this for videoconferencing room. A microphone array around the screen should be able to dynamically focus on the active talkers and cancel out background noise and echos to get much better sound quality that the muddy crap we usually get.

If there were a speaker array around the screens too, you might be able to localize the audio for each person so that it seems like the sound is coming from where their head is on the screen.

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Beamforming is standard in modern conference room gear. It's being used for making a video focus on the active speaker and optimizing his audio.

Have a look at the "Meeting Owl" for example.

It works great up to a limit (around 5m) then you will need additional microphones closer to the speaker.

XMOS targets this space specifically.

https://www.xmos.com/ a descendant of the Transputer.

Shure sells a variety of array microphones (and the software) that handles similar things. I've never used one, but heh.

https://www.shure.com/en-US/products/microphones/mxa710

https://www.shure.com/en-US/products/microphones/mxa920

Microsoft Research had papers on speaker arrays that allowed speaker focus and noise cancelling a couple of decades ago. I think the technology eventually ended up in the Kinect.

I think Cisco had something similar in their large screen meeting room video conferencing systems that could do positional audio tracking of multiple people. Could be wrong, but I think that was at least 10 years or so ago, if not more.

You just need to buy actual video conferencing gear, this is par for the course.

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