Headphone extension system

In an embodiment, a music playing and listening apparatus comprising at least one speaker, at least one audio input receiver, at least one audio output interface at least one amplifier, and at least one power source.Published versio

An outdoor spatially-aware audio playback platform exemplified by a virtual zoo

Outlined in this short paper is a framework for the construction of outdoor location-and direction-aware audio applications along with an example application to showcase the strengths of the framework and to demonstrate how it works. Although there has been previous work in this area which has concentrated on the spatial presentation of sound through wireless headphones, typically such sounds are presented as though originating from specific, defined spatial locations within a 3D environment. Allowing a user to move freely within this space and adjusting the sound dynamically as we do here, further enhances the perceived reality of the virtual environment. Techniques to realise this are implemented by the real-time adjustment of the presented 2 channels of audio to the headphones, using readings of the user's head orientation and location which in turn are made possible by sensors mounted upon the headphones. Aside from proof of concept indoor applications, more user-responsive applications of spatial audio delivery have not been prototyped or explored. In this paper we present an audio-spatial presentation platform along with a primary demonstration application for an outdoor environment which we call a {\em virtual audio zoo}. This application explores our techniques to further improve the realism of the audio-spatial environments we can create, and to assess what types of future application are possible

Spatially augmented audio delivery: applications of spatial sound awareness in sensor-equipped indoor environments

Current mainstream audio playback paradigms do not take any account of a user's physical location or orientation in the delivery of audio through headphones or speakers. Thus audio is usually presented as a static perception whereby it is naturally a dynamic 3D phenomenon audio environment. It fails to take advantage of our innate psycho-acoustical perception that we have of sound source locations around us. Described in this paper is an operational platform which we have built to augment the sound from a generic set of wireless headphones. We do this in a way that overcomes the spatial awareness limitation of audio playback in indoor 3D environments which are both location-aware and sensor-equipped. This platform provides access to an audio-spatial presentation modality which by its nature lends itself to numerous cross-dissiplinary applications. In the paper we present the platform and two demonstration applications

Wireless Water Flow Meter Network in the Great Bay

The Oyster Restoration Program alongside the New Hampshire chapter of the Nature Conservancy is working towards developing new oyster beds throughout the Great Bay. Sedimentation is proving to be a vast problem by covering up the beds before they have a chance to grow to a healthy level. The many rivers entering the Great Bay are bringing the sediments from all over the region and limiting the ability of the program to develop the new beds. They need a way to measure the sedimentation rate, by measuring the flow rate of the rivers over a single tidal cycle in various locations throughout the bay. This is done simply by the design of a wireless water flow meter network. Using a Price Meter as the measurement tool and an Arduino UNO to organize the data, the Oyster Restoration Program can monitor the characteristics of the locations to gain a better understanding of the location as a potential site for a new oyster bed. The design of an self contained system to extract and store the data to be collected is essential to speed up the process of monitoring these locations, which the device developed here will do

Illinois Campus Media Census Survey Questionnaire

The survey questionnaire used for live, on-site interviews during the Illinois Campus Media Census.Ope

Wireless Charging for Bluetooth Earphones

This project involves designing and building an inductive charging system for Bluetooth earphones. This system provides a charging dock for a pair of retrofitted Bluetooth earphones and focuses on ease-of-use and convenience for the user. The motivations for this project include providing charging compatibility to changing audio technology and trends. Smart phones and other audio products are increasingly leaning towards wireless (Bluetooth) audio, and wireless headphones/headsets are naturally becoming more prevalent to match this trend. A small, easy to use, and efficient charging dock for these earphones seems like a necessary accessory for this technology to seem attractive to consumers. The end-product includes a charging station along a pair of headphones with a receiver coil and necessary receiver circuitry installed. The charging station is designed using SolidWorks and 3D printed to both house the transmitter circuitry as well as provide a platform for the headphones to be placed on

Sonification of guidance data during road crossing for people with visual impairments or blindness

In the last years several solutions were proposed to support people with visual impairments or blindness during road crossing. These solutions focus on computer vision techniques for recognizing pedestrian crosswalks and computing their relative position from the user. Instead, this contribution addresses a different problem; the design of an auditory interface that can effectively guide the user during road crossing. Two original auditory guiding modes based on data sonification are presented and compared with a guiding mode based on speech messages. Experimental evaluation shows that there is no guiding mode that is best suited for all test subjects. The average time to align and cross is not significantly different among the three guiding modes, and test subjects distribute their preferences for the best guiding mode almost uniformly among the three solutions. From the experiments it also emerges that higher effort is necessary for decoding the sonified instructions if compared to the speech instructions, and that test subjects require frequent `hints' (in the form of speech messages). Despite this, more than 2/3 of test subjects prefer one of the two guiding modes based on sonification. There are two main reasons for this: firstly, with speech messages it is harder to hear the sound of the environment, and secondly sonified messages convey information about the "quantity" of the expected movement