I spoke with the CEO of Sennheiser about audio, virtual reality and the notion of legacy
The probability's higher for you to have a good idea if you have many ideas. That's why we like to try new things. In the case of AR and VR it was really just connecting the dots in the industry trends that we were seeing. More than five years ago, neither were very wide spread, but what we saw was that everyone who was worrying about virtual reality was worrying about the picture. No one was worried about sound. You would have a 3D game, but you had mono sound. We saw an empty space. We felt that we could leverage some 3D audio technology that we had been researching for over 12 years.
At our San Fransisco research lab, we'd been experimenting with binaural 3D rendering and all kinds of fun stuff. At the time, we had no idea of how this could ever be commercialized. We just thought it was cool. That's the beauty of being a family-owned business. You can do things that you like and believe may have a future. As VR advanced and AR showed up, we saw saw that we could apply our technology to it. That was the first attempt with the VR mic that we made. The way that we brought this to the market was unique: we didn't develop a product to present. Instead, we brought our prototype of the mic to CES and asked everyone, "What would you do with that?" It was really a co-creation.
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