Adding Haptic Feedback through Inaudible Bass with SubPac

It was on a San Jose sidewalk in 2015 that I first tried the SubPac and felt like I was immediately transported into a dance club standing in front of giant subwoofers with the soundwaves of bass rippling through my body, but yet no one around me could hear a thing. The magic of the SubPac is that it translates the inaudible frequencies lower than 40Hz into a vibrating haptic feedback that provides a much more immersive experience.

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I’ve seen a lot of different experiences at conferences over the past year using the SubPac to increase immersion, and I was able to catch up with business developer Zach Jaffe at VRLA to hear about some of their content partnerships and new S2 Backback. We talk about some of the VR experiences and songs that have good low frequency bass design that specifically take the SubPac into consideration. We also talk about the future of immersive sound design, and his prediction that music labels will want to remix albums to work well within spatialized audio environments.

There isn’t a spatialized audio open standard yet, and so the music industry is waiting to see what formats emerge. At the moment, a fully immersive VR experience is the best option to get full audio spatialization, but a yet-to-be determined, standard format for object-oriented or spatialized audio could be used with head-tracked headphones like Ossic X as well as with future versions of SubPac devices that have directional bass incorporated.

Here’s a number of VR experiences and music videos that are SubPac-optimized (though the unit works well even with experiences that aren’t designed for it):

• Jurassic Worlds
• Suicide Squad: Special Ops VR
• TheWave Rave at VRLA
• Mr Robot VR experience by Within
• The Presence Gear VR video
• Rocket Launch 360: DeltaIV NROL-45 by Koncept VR
• In the Eyes of the Animal at Sundance
• Inner Activity Meditative Experience at SIGGRAPH 2016.

And some music videos which work well:

• Run The Jewels – Crown (Official VR 360 Music Video)
• Grandtheft – Summer In The Winter | 360 VR
• Jazz Cartier – Red Alert / 100 Roses (360° Virtual Reality Video)
• Moderat – Running (Official Video)

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Music: Fatality & Summer Trip