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The project team has begun turning their prototype into the final product. Their ability to ship the products may be affected by product development or financial challenges.
At OSSIC, we're developing the future of 3D audio in headphones. Our first product, the OSSIC X, is the world's first smart headphone that uses anatomy calibration to playback incredibly immersive 3D audio tailored to the way you hear the world everyday.
THE WORLD’S MOST ADVANCED 3D AUDIO SMART HEADPHONE
OSSIC X is the world’s first smart 3D audio headphone that instantly calibrates to the listener, increasing the sense of auditory space, and acoustically recreating the way you hear the world everyday. By pairing advanced 3D audio algorithms with head-tracking and individual anatomy calibration, we deliver incredibly accurate 3D sound to your ears. Experience music like never before. Get more immersed in virtual reality. Bring gaming to the next level.
INSTANT CALIBRATION FOR A 10X AUDIO EXPERIENCE
OSSIC X calibrates to the individual listener’s head and ear features, increasing overall sound quality and ensuring the most accurate sound placement, making for a listening experience that’s ten times more immersive than current technologies.
Increased audio immersion
Hear your movies and music like never before
Increased sense of space with your audio content
Audio is a crucial part of the way we experience content. By implementing accurate 3D audio, any content can take the listener to new places by improving the following:
OSSIC X FOR VIRTUAL REALITY
In virtual reality, sound is key. With accurate 3D sound we can give a sense of space and direct your attention to elements outside your field of view for a more immersive experience.
Drastically improved sound localization
Increased sense of presence
Accurately render sound in any x,y,z coordinate in space
OSSIC X FOR GAMING
Having accurate sound in gaming can make or break the experience, allowing you to know what’s going on in the spaces of the game that you can’t see.
Immerse yourself in the game
Accurately position sounds for a competitive advantage
Boomless mic for continued audio communication
Enjoy any movie theater audio experience from wherever you are.
OSSIC changes the way you listen to music. Imagine being able to listen to any song from your collection on the best speaker setup money can buy, or hear a concert from the best seats in your favorite concert hall.
Replicate the ideal listening room or speaker setup.
Hear your music exactly how the artist intended.
See and hear what others have said about hearing 3D audio for the first time.
WE ALL HEAR THE WORLD DIFFERENTLY BASED ON OUR ANATOMY
How we hear the world is not a one-size-fits all situation. It's our physical anatomy that plays a critical role in defining how sound enters our ears. This is called our head related transfer function, or HRTF. Our individual HRTF is based on:
Our position in space
The size of our head
The shape of our ears
TRADITIONAL HEADPHONES DON’T ACCOUNT FOR OUR ANATOMY
With traditional headphones the listeners anatomy is not taken into account. This makes for an incredibly small listening experience, where sound remains close to your head rather than around you. This leads to:
A “close to your head” listening experience
Inaccurate ability to place sounds in space
Degradation in overall sound quality
CALIBRATION PUTS YOU BACK INTO THE LISTENING EQUATION
OSSIC X is a smart headphone, using a combination of sensors and software to calibrate to the individual listener’s head and ear feature to increase overall sound quality and ensuring the most accurate sound placement. This alone makes for a listening experience that’s ten times more immersive than current technologies.
HOW IT WORKS OSSIC calibration process starts as soon as you put the headphones on. The data is instantly paired with our smart algorithms to determine accurate sound playback based on your anatomy and position. No laboratories required.
3D Audio naturally replicates the way we hear the world everyday, with measurable results.
This is done with two types of testing:
PHYSICS-BASED TESTING
Acoustical, physics-based testing. With a microphone in the ear, does the headphone reproduce the same signal as a real sound in space? Here we compared the OSSIC X to a gaming headphone.
PEOPLE-BASED TESTING
We ask people where they think the sound comes from with the headphone on, and compare it to where the sound was supposed to come from. Here we can see the OSSIC X places sound at the right angle and depth and the gaming headphone does not.
Using the AUX or USB connection, OSSIC X is compatible with a multitude of devices to provide 3D audio playback.
While the OSSIC X already supports existing standard 2D formats such as stereo, 5.1, and 7.1, we want to make it easy for game and sound designers to go beyond. By using the OSSIC X, you can design fully immersive soundscapes without installing ceiling speakers or sitting in your studio.
FOR GAME ENGINES
In gaming engines, the sounds can be tied to any objects or characters, and these are already natively positioned in 3D. Currently these sounds get compressed to, at most, 7 channels (and a subwoofer) on a ring around the listener. We are designing plugins that let natively 3D audio pass through to the listener.
We already have a prototype FMOD plug-in running, and it sounds great and operates efficiently. We are testing it with some early developers now. We would love to hear from you! Please fill out the survey to prioritize roll-out for the different platforms: Unity, Unreal, FMOD, Wwise, VST, AU, and/or others.
For audio produced using standard DAWs, we will be supporting VST and AU.
ABBEY ROAD RED
OSSIC is proud to join the latest class of innovative companies at Abbey Road Red, a music and technology incubation program within the world famous Abbey Road Studios. More information can be found at http://www.abbeyroad.com/abbeyroadred
THX LIMITED We’re excited to be working with THX to ensure that OSSIC X meets the highest standard for audio reproduction.
EVONEXUS INCUBATOR OSSIC is proud to be supported by the EvoNexus Incubator in San Diego, CA.
OSSIC started in a home living room in August 2014. Since that time, we’ve spent the last year and a half developing over 9 generations of prototypes and countless acoustic tests in order to bring accurate 3D audio to headphones.
TESTING
PROTOTYPE DEVELOPMENT
A MISSION TO CHANGE THE WAY WE HEAR SOUND
After working in the audio industry for a combined fifty years developing some of the top selling headphones and speakers on the market, our founding team realized there was a large gap in what was currently available for 3D sound, and what was possible. The technology was available, but limited by intensive laboratory calibration and typically coming at very high cost. The team believed that everyone should have access to the highest level of audio experience possible, so they formed OSSIC in 2015 with one mission: to redefine the way we hear sound by taking the final leap between reproduced audio and audio that's indistinguishable from reality.
We’re redefining the way we hear audio in headphones. While we’ve come this far with an incredibly small team and a boot-strapped budget, we need your help in making this technology a reality.
MANUFACTURING COSTS
This is the most capital intensive part of our next phase. We’ve developed many headphones over the course of our careers, so we’ve got a very good idea on costs needed to produce the initial molds, purchase supplies, meet the minimum quantity order, and ship to consumers. We need your help to get us to the production phase of our hardware.
CREATING THE NEXT GENERATION OF 3D AUDIO
Our goal is to not only develop a product, but help educate the world on the potential of what a 10X improvement in audio immersion can sound like. To do this, we need your support from this initial campaign to not only fund our production, but also get the word out about what we’re developing.
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