Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/1316380
56 I M PS E . O R G The 360° Elephant in the Room Sony's 360 Virtual Mixing Environment The most talked about technology at the event was easily Sony's 360 Virtual Mixing Environment ( VME). Sony's 360 VME is the latest iteration of the company's prototype software that allows for an individual to sample their hearing in one environment and reproduce that environment in a set of headphones. Currently in beta testing at Sony Pictures, the software allows supervising sound editors and their crew of sound designers, sound e‰ ects editors, and dialogue editors to edit, pre-dub, or conform on a set of headphones in their home o¨ ces and hear their work as though they are sitting on the famous Cary Grant Theatre or any of the other world-class stages at Sony Pictures Entertainment. While the technology sounds like it is just this side of magic, the process is simple. Currently, a user must come to the stage which they want to have sampled, wear tiny, custom microphones focused toward their ear canal and sit through a series of sine wave tone sweeps. The system will output one tone sweep for each speaker in the array you are looking to emulate with up to 16 sweeps to scan a 9.1.6 Dolby Atmos array. Then, while still wearing the microphones, the user puts on a set of headphones and the sweeps repeat for the left/right confi guration of the headphones. An HRTF calculation is made, resulting in impulse response fi les for the individual's head calibration in the room that can be translated to the headphones. Having received a very early demonstration of the technology, I can personally attest that the process was simple, and the results were remarkable. In a panel discussion sponsored by Sony titled Life Saver! Ideal Environment for Sound Designing at Home, with New Sony Technology, Andrew DeCristafaro described a personally familiar situation. "You watch people go through the test and each of them put the headphones on and waits a beat before saying, 'Did you…? You need to turn the monitors off…' and as they remove the headphones, there's a realization that what they were just hearing was only the headphones." Kami Asgar, supervising sound editor on the upcoming Venom: Let There Be Carnage echoed the sentiment,