Kia Motors’ latest audio tech can provide car passengers with an isolated audio stream, and offer privacy when making a hands-free phone call.
Kia’s NVH Research lab has been hard at work on audio systems to improve car passengers’ experiences and its latest development is next-generation Separated Sound Zone (SSZ) technology. Its goal? To create a technology that allows each passenger in a vehicle to experience an audio stream tailored specifically to them.
Music, hands-free phone calls and vehicle alerts are just three of the examples Kia offers when outlining sounds that passengers may or may not wish to hear.
One of the company’s driving forces (excuse the pun) behind the creation of the system is the growing expectation that we’re not that far off a future of driverless cars. The thought process goes that, with their hands off the controls, drivers’ and passengers’ attentions will turn to the entertainment.
“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.” says Kang-duck Ih, research fellow 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.”
While delivering an isolated experience in terms of audio feed, the system also allows passengers to converse freely by creating and controlling acoustic fields of the car.
A huge array of in-car speakers work in a similar way to noise cancellation systems but allow users to ditch the headphones.
With technology in development since 2014, Kia reckons it is now just one or two years outside mass production.
