Robotic Musician
Shimon Dances
Marimba playing robot, Shimon, uses gestures and visual queues to improve collaboration with musicians.
Product, Spatial Audio
Spherephones
3D Spatial audio headphones that branched from NSF funded project
Spherephones are a designed 3D spaital audio headphone that came as a byproduct of my NSF Funded PhD thesis. Spherephones are designed to be able to localize and spatialize audio anywhere in 3D space. Current approaches use audio filtering or require personalized Transfer Function measurements. Spherephones dimensions are able to use our body’s natural spatial filtering, which makes the system more genralizable than software approaches.
The back area of our ear, the pinnae, is often used for localizing audio. Our ear geometry creates natural filters that our brain can interpret as localized audio. We position the drivers to make sure they cover the whole ear in a way to let our brains still spatialize the audio properly. This also lets us portray sound from below the ear, something that ATMOS and ambisonics cannot currently render.
We additionally received a GT AIM grant of $50,000 to try and commercialize the spherephones. A patent was filed March 2026! We developed compatibility to use spherephones with VR, with spatial audio music, and for people who are blind/visually impaired.
Relevant Publications
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Robotic Dancer
Forest
A forest of twelve robot arms (uFactory xArm) use dancer-inspired movement and music input to dance with humans.