Virtual speaker and baffle system developed by the research team led by Professor Ih, Jeong-Guon

The transfer of intuitive and perceptual information is essential for the human-machine interaction in the future machines. Acoustics Laboratory led by Professor J.-G. Ih at Mechanical Eng. Dept. has been studying on the electroacoustic and psychoacoustic research topics for the comfortable auditory communication and perception of the machine sound. Recently, they developed a technique of converting the machine surface itself into the virtual speaker and baffle for an efficient and high quality sound generation. This technique can overcome the difficulties in having an appreciable space for locating the conventional speakers, and generating a poor quality sound radiated from a panel speaker excited by an actuator. In this technique, actuators located at the periphery of the panel generate the complex bending waves to create the virtual speakers and baffle at some designated locations of the surface. To obtain the proper complex gain for the actuators, the vibro-acoustic inverse problem should be solved to fit the rendered speaker. The developed technique can be applied to various areas including smart vehicles, ICT devices, A/V devices including OLED TV, home appliances, augmented contents, Internet of Things (IoT), acoustic source in virtual reality (VR), etc. The promotion film of the developed technology can be watched through the link given below, which was supported by the 2017 End Run Project of the Institute for Startup KAIST.