What's the news?
Fancy sitting in a car, listening to your favourite music and yet still able to converse with your fellow passengers, even though they're listening to something else and you're not wearing headphones? All sound too weird to be true? Then you'll be interested to hear about Kia's Separated Sound Zone (SSZ) technology, which it has revealed for the first time.
Kia says SSZ 'creates and controls' the acoustic fields of the car, allowing the driver and each passenger to hear isolated sounds. It means you can listen to an audio stream tailored to your individual needs - like music, hands-free phone calls or vehicle alerts, for instance - without the need for headphones.
SSZ works by utilising the multiple speakers installed in a vehicle to reduce or increase audio levels of sound waves. This negates the overlap of sounds behind heard in each seat, which is a similar principle to noise cancellation systems. And the lack of earpieces to make the most of this means that you can still interact with your fellow human beings in the car, unless they're a frightful collection of bores and you want nothing to do with them.
Incredibly, hands-free phone calls can be isolated to individual passengers, so you can have a private conversation with the caller that no one else in the cabin can hear at all. And the bonus for the driver is that he or she can drive in total silence if they want to, filtering out all the background noise from the other occupants so that the driver can focus on the actual task of driving. As a final bonus, if your kid is asleep in the back but you still want to listen to Pendulum at full volume, then it should be possible to do so without waking the youngster.
Kia says SSZ technology has been in development since 2014, and the completed mass production system is expected to be ready for installation in vehicles within one to two years.
Anything else?
"Customers in the autonomous navigation era will demand increasingly customisable entertainment options within their vehicles, which includes technological innovations such as the Separated Sound System," said Kang-duck Ih, researcher at Kia's NVH Research Lab. "I hope by providing drivers and passengers with tailored, independent audio spaces, they will experience a more comfortable and entertaining transportation environment."
To, er... see (and hear, obviously) SSZ in action, you can watch a video right here.
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