I think op is talking about beamforming when he talks about directional audio, where a large array of speakers would allow you to e.g. send audio in one direction only. The more speakers, the tighter the control.
I don’t think OP was saying that, but you are. A video layer could be built on the gridlines between the speaker domes. Might need to be quite a large screen for the spacing to work out right. Not for high def video, but good for large displays like talking billboards (ugh, actually).
That would be great, but doesn't really need new speaker technology, at the scale of cinema screens - not like you need pixel granularity - just the encoding to support it. When I had a Saturday job at a cinema a couple of the screens had the centre speakers behind them iirc, it just wasn't an individually addressable array.
Having said that, I suppose Atmos already implicitly supports it, isn't the idea of it that you can put speakers wherever you want and it remixes appropriately? So if your recording was sufficiently granular that dialogue isn't just all vaguely 'at the front' it could already split between say five (corners & middle) 'centres'?
> isn't the idea of it that you can put speakers wherever you want and it remixes appropriately?
No, Atmos has some tolerance for speaker placement but the general positions are somewhat strict (i.e. 1 Front Center, 2 Stereo Fronts, ...). The idea of Atmos is that given a correct sound setup, a sound can be positioned as an Object in 3d Space within the sound bubble. And that only works to a certain degree. If you want a strong 3D sound effect, the Object pretty much needs to be moving (bullets swishing beside your ear). Static Objects are still somewhat restricted to the edges of the bubble or at least i can hear the 3d effect breakdown when static objects are placed in 3d space as opposed to moving objects
You would also need an IMU in the headphones to modify the phase when the listener adjusts or her head. This is an important part of how we discern forward from behind.
And for some reason using that is a pretty weird experience. I've been so conditioned not to expect it that I actually turn it off to make it feel "natural"
It’s a weird experience, a bit uncanny valley like. I was using while watching video, and it’s somewhat eerie to turn my head and still have the audio from the earphones “pinned” to the screen.
