A conversation between Taisuke Yagi of Otomake Podcast and Takahito Iguchi of Audio Metavere, Inc:
“The future of the metaverse is audio”
In the first part of this three-part podcast series, Iguchi talks about his motivation to develop the audio metaverse
Takahito Iguchi was originally active in AR with his products Sekai Camera and Telepathy One. A few years ago he decided to focus on the world of social audio, back when there was still little to no understanding of the concept. In this interview, Taisuke Yagi finds out what made Iguchi buckle down to audio and the creation of his most recent product: the audio metaverse.
Yagi: “Thank you so much for joining me today. Sekai Camera was actually one of the first products that made me think of the amazing possibilities technology has to offer. It still inspires me today.”
Iguchi: “Thank you for having me. The original idea of Sekai Camera was that there should be a world where we do not need to search or struggle to communicate. If the world is bit-based, everyone would be able to code and communicate with each other digitally and be free of struggles.”
Iguchi, who spent much of his college years coding despite majoring in philosophy, says that he felt as if the world had somehow become a bit more digitalized and that he was awakened to the possibilities of connecting people digitally at a time when PCs and the Internet were not widely available yet.
As digital societies were expanding, Iguchi was working on his own products in San Francisco where he could experience the development of cutting edge technologies and products. “That experience opened my eyes to the possibilities in technology and digital connections between people,” says Iguchi.
This eventually led him to developing the wearable glasses Telepathy One in 2013.
Smart glasses are iconic devices in near-future science fiction. However, because they take away the user’s visual attention span, the freedom to use them becomes limited to specific times and places. In addition, as development progressed, it became clear that wearable eyeglass devices were “not very fun” because it was difficult to gain a sense of immersion. This explains why VR glasses are more popular than AR glasses in terms of immersiveness.
Iguchi: “The one sense that transcends all of these hurdles is sound, I thought. It has a strong effect on human emotions without blocking one’s visual senses.”
Yagi: “The audio field has also been trending in Silicon Valley for the past years.”
Iguchi: “The fact that smart speakers and new types of earphones like AirPods were pretty popular early on in the US market, I could tell that audio would become mainstream very soon. The emergence of smart speakers and earbuds, such as AirPods Pro, which allow people to experience spatial audio on a daily basis, is making it possible to reproduce a form of communication similar to the human communication style.”
In 2020, the coronavirus pandemic turned the public’s attention to using social media with their voice instead of worrying about their appearance while spending their time on social media at home. This made social audio apps like Clubhouse gain enormous popularity.
Iguchi: “A year earlier in 2019, we had already developed a similar interactive social audio app called Dabel. However, I realized that these types of social media apps currently work as a phone call or a radio call, with a speaker and listener, a beginning and ending and are therefore alien to the kind of communication we normally engage in on a day-to-day basis. I wanted to evolve to a more immersive, future-proof and inclusive solution accessible to all which is the audio metaverse.”
“I wanted to evolve to a more immersive, future-proof and inclusive solution accessible to all which is the audio metaverse,” says Takahito Iguchi.
Yagi: “So, what is the audio metaverse exactly?”
Iguchi: “The one characteristic of human communication that can’t be reproduced solely by having an interactive solution is its intermittent nature. For example, there are two people talking at a café. As you walk up to them, you gradually get a clear picture of what they are talking about. The ambient spatial audio sounds around them will also naturally change. The audio metaverse offers this reality in augmented audio spaces connected to physical locations. In that way we can naturally communicate with each other: the spaces are always on and there is no speaker-listener hierarchy.”
The establishment of voice internet is just around the corner.
Listen to the first part of the Otomake podcast here (Japanese):
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