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Noise-cancelling headphones that let you hear a “bubble” around you, but block out everything else? It sounds great and researchers have developed the technology.

Noise-cancelling headphones that let you hear a “bubble” around you, but block out everything else? It sounds great and researchers have developed the technology.

Sound Bubble adds additional microphones to detect distance
Filter unwanted audio by proximity
There is still a lot in the future technology archive.

The best noise-canceling headphones are brilliant things, but there's still plenty of room to improve what active noise cancellation can do. And a new system could make current modes of conversation transparency and awareness seem positively prehistoric.

The technology comes from engineers at the University of Washington. We've reported on their work before: earlier this year they unveiled a system called Target Speech Hearing that could tell who you were looking at and prioritize their voice. And now they have another great idea: Sound Bubble.

'Sound Bubble' Headphones Demo – YouTube

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How Sound Bubble could change the way you cancel

The name Sound Bubble may bring to mind images of a kid-friendly Bluetooth speaker. But this bubble is much more interesting than that. As NewAtlas.com reports, it's essentially an ANC system with six additional microphones, and those microphones are connected to a neural network.

That network is the key. It analyzes the audio from the microphones to determine the distance of sound sources and that allows you to configure cancellation not only by frequencies but also by proximity. It can block out distant sounds and amplify closer ones, allowing you to hear what you want much more easily.

If you've ever had difficulty hearing your friends in a crowded space, you can see the appeal of Sound Bubble: setting the noise cancellation so that it doesn't filter out your friends but still eliminates chat from other tables or other unwanted messages. . noise, it's exactly the kind of feature I would gladly swap out my existing headphones for.

It's also considerably more practical than the last version, which used a group of small robots to listen to the room you were in. Fun, but not ideal at your local bar.

This is still in the archive of jetpacks and flying cars tech that looks awesome but you can't buy yet. But given the pace of change (and fierce competition) in the ANC audio market, it may not be long before we put something very similar in our ears.