The use of supporting communication technology in everyday work is ubiquitous – and thanks to teleconferencing systems, teams can interactively exchange information over long distances and collaborate intensively. However, the technology also sets limits – everyone has probably already experienced simultaneous and overlapping contributions in telephone conferences. Software Campus participant Dennis Guse (http://www.dennisguse.de) is researching how this technology can be improved.
He is one of the participants of the newest year of the program. At Software Campus, the doctoral student from TU Berlin collaborates with Deutsche Telekom AG. The objective of his project is the implementation of a telephone system that enables telephone conferences with 3D audio representation. The novelty of the implementation lies in the fact that the 3D audio representation can be used with conventional stereo-capable terminals, since the so-called rendering is done by the telephone system and the terminals only need to reproduce these signals. Dennis explained “The current technological switchover to telephony via voice-over-IP even favors the widespread use of 3D audio representation. The telephone conferencing system implemented in this project thus follows current market developments and is dedicated to simplifying national and international conversations with several participants”. The more realistic representation of the discussion participants means that the technology is pushed into the background in the discussion process – because it functions and supports smoothly. Instead, the actual goal of the telephone conference is once again in focus: the communication of content between several participants over long distances.
The project can be found online under the name SPATIAL TELEPHONE CONFERENCING FOR ASTERISK (STEAK): http://www.SteakConferencing.de There you will find detailed information on the project, the source code of the implementation and access to the demo system. The demo system can be used to try out the spatial representation during telephone conferences live in the web browser.