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Though remote conferencing has brought a series of improvements to many organizations -- requiring many of us to work remotely and dial-in to our daily meetings -- it’s also brought about major innovation in the marketplace. As a thriving spatial audio solutions company, we’ve taken it upon ourselves to consider the seriousness of how current market demands might change remote conferencing as we know it. 

At HEAR360, we’re currently developing an entirely new cloud-based approach toward remote conferencing. We believe that video-conferencing is a strong asset to any workforce, but we know that audio for remote-conferencing needs a serious upgrade. 

How so? 

A major drawback of remote conferencing is the lack of positional audio. If you’re doing a one-on-one call, knowing where the speaker is located is not an issue. However, across large-scale organizations -- like Microsoft, Facebook, or Samsung -- multi-participant remote conferencing can be a problem. With no organized team-layout or indicators of who is speaking, remote conferencing becomes increasingly difficult, resulting in a chaotic swirl of voices and ideas. All broadcasted sound on these calls is mono, and this audio competes for the same spatial space. Some platforms try to enlarge the video profile of users who are speaking to create visual cues, but these can be distracting when many people are talking at once, and is not an accessible solutions to persons with blindness/vision-impairments. In a real meeting, we naturally rely on spatial cues that allow us to choose who we want to pay attention to and respond to. Spatial audio can bring this same feature in remote conferencing. 

How would it work? Here’s our take on it. 

A lightweight, simple solution, remote conferencing with spatial audio would require a tech-stack in addition to some development in order to scale with your organization’s needs. 

Imagine if remote conference hosts and participants could select a seat or position to be arranged for a conference call. Once all positions are selected, the conference audio would be localized to each position with its own HRTF filter, giving each member their own spatial audio position. During a spatial audio remote conference, all participants would be able to identify and remember their colleagues’ positioning. 

To execute this vision, we would need to consider high-resolution sound as a key component for the reception audio of each users’ device. Users’ reception audio would need to be in stereo. However, the broadcast audio could be mono. A spatial filter for the entire conference’s audio would be applied in the cloud, and the final mix would be delivered to everyone with their corresponding spatial positions.

In its conceptual stages, this remote conferencing solution still allows for development liberties, including any specific features your organization might need. 

Now more than ever before, remote conferencing is enabling people all around the globe to connect. In fact, remote conferencing is allowing our team-communications to thrive! If we have an opportunity to positively impact the way our rapidly-developing remote workforce communicates with one another, we believe we should pursue it. 

In fact, spatial audio for remote conferencing can be a viable asset for people of the blind and visually-impaired community, offering them all the sonic richness of an in-person meeting. 

It’s important to remember that this isn’t just about remote-conferencing, but rather communication overall. To truly connect with one another virtually (as if we were right next to one another), can have tremendous benefits: trust, empathy, and increased productivity. The world is changing, and we must adapt or get left behind. 

For more news, catch us on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram! And reach out to Matt@HEAR360.io if you want to talk about a remote-conferencing solution for your company.