When we moved our R&D setup into the Brewery Artist Lofts to expand our experimentation, one aspect of Loud Movies was immediately curtailed: the music volume now needs to be kept low to keep the neighbors happy. Faced with the possibility that we can not test the full immersive experience in this space, we connected with Sound Off™ to see if they would be interested in joining the project as an official Partner. We are pleased to announce that we have been working closely with Sound Off to push their existing Silent Disco offerings as far as possible, and working together to expand the options for getting data to and from their headphones to expand the creative and technical possibilities of using them in this kind of immersive environment.
We started working with Sound Off Silent Disco headphones because we could not run any full demos in our testing studio, but in working with them we have discovered multiple non-obvious benefits to using headphones vs. loudspeakers. In a normal loud music environment, people are either dancing or leaving the area to talk – with headphones people can do both, and we have seen multiple participants go back and forth from dancing in headphones to talking to their friends in a seamless back and forth. Some of the people at these demos have reported that the ability to control the volume solved a pain point of never having the sound level at an event be exactly where they want it to be. There have been a few reports that the headphones make the experience more immersive, as they block the sounds of people talking or laughing so it is easier to lose yourself to the music and visuals. The lights on the headsets are controllable, and we have changed them for each demo to make it easier to identify photos and videos of each event based solely on the color of these LEDs. Having each participant wear colored LED lights on their heads creates a visual connection between everyone on the dance floor, something that we are working to expand so that we can change the colors of the headsets in realtime as part of the show.
