Panasonic Avionics Corporation and HEAR360 have agreed to bring Spatial Audio – a 3D theatrical surround sound experience – to airline passengers.
This will allow IFE content – live or on-demand- to be presented in 3D Spatial Audio in real time using HEAR360’s proprietary audio technology. It can be delivered seamlessly over any wired or Bluetooth wireless headphones or earbuds.
Spatial Audio will be available initially as a standard feature with Panasonic Avionics’ new Astrova IFE solution, complementing its 4K OLED screens.
For airlines there are benefits to rolling this out, as they will not need to change their media procurement processes or deliverables, as no special media encoding or file types are required, thereby ensuring no increase in their media spend.
In Quotes
Andy Masson, Vice President, Product Management of Panasonic Avionics, says:
“Spatial Audio provides passengers with a comparable experience to a home theater system they would enjoy on the ground, while enabling airlines to offer premium audio and remain efficient with their media spending.”
“The launch of Spatial Audio represents the latest evolution in the industry leading sound solutions Panasonic Avionics offers and follows our previous milestones including the introduction of HD Audio in 2015, and full cabin Bluetooth Audio in 2021.”
Matt Marrin, Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder of HEAR360, said:
“We are thrilled to partner with Panasonic Avionics to give all passengers an unparalleled immersive and engaging inflight experience using our revolutionary audio technology. Being content and device agnostic not only means we democratize best-in-class audio for everyone to enjoy, it provides Panasonic Avionics and its airline customers with immediate scalability in a cost-effective manner.”
The proof will be in the listening
Spatial Audio is a technology that has been deployed in some content vendors, with the content being re-encoded to support this, with devices to assist (for popular implementation, Apple uses it a lot, as well as the Dolby Atmos standard) to give the impression of audio “all around you”.
As we progress to 4K and beyond, content has to keep up (something it has struggled to do – you can have all the shiny displays installed, but if your content is encoded to DVD quality, you’re going to need to do some heavy upscaling).
Innovation in the cabin is something to be welcomed – and audio is sometimes a
The proof, as they say, will be how this handles in the real world.
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