Facebook’s Augmented Reality hearing aids can focus on sounds you’re ‘looking at’
Research lead for Facebook’s Hearing Science lab told Digital Trends, ”Many people with hearing loss don’t use hearing aids — in part — because they don’t work well in everyday situations like a noisy restaurant, a conversation involving multiple people at a loud party, or in a moving car.”
The team is exploring how they can use beamforming technology, deep learning, noise cancellation, and AR to fix this problem.
The reason: The team is using AR glasses to know which sounds you want to focus on. The technology will then amplify that sound while drowning out the rest.
It works firstly on the AR side of things. The technology can map out the objects – or in this case a person you’re talking to. Once it understands what it needs to focus on, the rest of the system comes into play by picking up only sounds coming from the ‘object’ and amplifying it while drowning out noises from objects, not in the field of focus.
The team also said that this technology could also work with phone calls, where the person on the other end will only hear your voice and the rest of the ambient sounds will be cancelled out.
See the full story here: https://sea.mashable.com/tech/13049/facebooks-augmented-reality-hearing-aids-can-focus-on-sounds-youre-looking-at