01 November 2001

So now: 3D sound... so then: stereo... so over: mono...

Five engineers who have developed and applied three-dimensional audio technology to computer games with dramatic effect have won the UK's biggest engineering prize - the £50,000 Royal Academy of Engineering MacRobert Award. Their audible innovation is now set to revolutionise the way we hear sound on mobile phones and palmtops.

Dr Alastair Sibbald, David Monteith, Richard Clemow, Peter Clare and Adam Philp of Sensaura Ltd in Hayes, West London, will receive the solid gold MacRobert Award medal and prize from HRH the Duke of Edinburgh on Wednesday 14 November 2001 in a special ceremony at Buckingham Palace. A special display of the technology they have developed will open on the same day at London's Science Museum.

Sensaura's engineers have duplicated the directional sensation that humans get listening to a live event - when a plane passes over you know instinctively where to look for it. "Our primitive ancestors needed their directional hearing to stay alive," says Managing Director David Monteith. "We take it for granted that we can hear in three dimensions but it's a real challenge to recreate that effect through ordinary stereo speakers."

Sensaura originally developed the 3D Positional Audio system to enhance classical music recordings, invoking the all-enveloping experience of music in the concert hall. The company soon realised that computers were a much bigger market and licensed it as software that now runs on over 50 million PCs worldwide. It provides truly immersive "surround" sound for game-players and music listeners through conventional stereo speakers from their PC. Sensaura™ 3D Positional Audio is particularly in demand for PC games, where it provides a completely immersive audio world. The system is now being applied to game consoles themselves, with Sensaura technology is incorporated in the eagerly anticipated Microsoft Xbox™ video game system, due for launch in the UK early next year.

This three-dimensional effect should make next-generation mobile phones more user-friendly. Sensaura technology can enable callers taking conference calls to "hear" different callers speaking from different positions around them - all via the same handset. The caller's voice can also be made to sound as though it is coming from a metre or so in front of the listener, instead of the current, unnatural "in-the-ear" voice.

These advances are possible thanks to the Sensaura team's deep understanding of the way we hear sounds and how we determine which direction they come from. We can hear in three dimensions, although we only have two ears. "The secret lies in the way our head and ears are built," says Sensaura's Principal Scientist Dr Alastair Sibbald. "They act like a complex, directionally-dependent acoustic antenna." Incoming sound waves are diffracted around the head before they reach the eardrum so the brain receives a slightly different signal from each ear. There is also a time delay between the signals reaching each ear - our brains combine all this information to tell us where to look for the sound.

"Artificial heads" - with microphones for ears - are used to model human hearing. Sound recordings made using these devices produce a 3D effect that incorporates these natural audio cues. "We have developed ways to synthesise these acoustic effects," says Dr Sibbald, "but the commercially available artificial heads were not precise enough, so we created our own pair of perfectly matched 'digital ears' to get the data we needed. Listeners can even programme the sound output to their own ear shape to get bespoke surround sound."

ends

Notes for editors

1. Sensaura was one of three finalists for this year's MacRobert Award - the other two were Belfast's Bombardier Aerospace for a new type of thrust reverser and Brighton-based Southern Water plc for a novel separator for sewage treatment.
   
2. The Royal Academy of Engineering honours the UK's most distinguished engineers and aims to take advantage of the enormous wealth of engineering knowledge and experience that its one thousand Fellows possess. It exists to pursue, encourage and maintain excellence in the whole field of engineering to promote the advancement of the science, art and practice of engineering for the benefit of the public.
   
3. Sensaura Limited provides sophisticated 3D audio technology for the interactive entertainment industry. Following its origin as a research project at THORN EMI Central Research Laboratories (CRL) in 1991, Sensaura has evolved to become the leading worldwide supplier of 3D audio. Sensaura licenses its technology to the major audio chip manufacturers, who supply in excess of 60% of the PC audio market. Sensaura technology is available on more than 50 million PCs worldwide, both on soundcards and motherboards. Recently it has advanced a stage further, and it is now available both on the new Microsoft Xbox™ and as a middleware product for the Sony PlayStation®2.
   
4. Sensaura, the Sensaura double crescent logo, Sensaura3D, 3DPA, Digital Ear, Sensaura MultiDrive, Sensaura MacroFX, Sensaura EnvironmentFX and Sensaura ZoomFX are all trademarks and/or registered trademarks of Sensaura Ltd. or Central Research Laboratories Ltd. Sensaura Limited is a Scipher Company. All other brands and names are the property of their respective owners.
   
   Xbox and Microsoft are trademarks of Microsoft Corp. PlayStation is a registered trademark of Sony Computer Entertainment Inc.

For more information please contact:

Jane Sutton at the Royal Academy of Engineering tel. 020 7227 0536 / 07989 513045
email: jane...@...org.uk

or

Rebecca Woolley at Sensaura Ltd tel. 020 8848 6766; email: rwoolley@sensaura.com

Links:

www.sensaura.com

www.raeng.org.uk

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