We’re halfway done, and it’s flying by. I only made it to one panel today, but spent a good amount of time in the the Trade Show seeing new and innovative tech.

Augmented Audio

VR and AR get all the buzz it seems. Another technology that alters your senses in the environment around you is augmented audio. Live channel mixing of the sounds around you, isolating voices and a crowded convention hall and recording audio beyond just left-and-right stereo are becoming easier through the use of special mics and earphones.

That’s right, all this is done in earphones.

The Sennheiser booth at the SXSW Trade Show demoed Ambeo, augmented audio earbuds that are compatible with iOS devices. All I had to do was plug them into my iPhone’s lightning connector and start recording video to get full surround sound recordings.

The representative had me record a video as she moved a shaker around my head. The earphones captured the audio with incredible spacial accuracy, and listening back to it gives me the same sensation as someone actually moving the shaker around my head.

Pop in some headphones, close your eyes and listen to the video below to see —  or…hear —  if you can imagine the shaker moving around my head.

Another team member, Logan, got to test out the sound isolation aspect of the augmented audio earphones. Check out his description of that as a singer at another booth near the Sennheiser station was performing.

Gochan

After some more wandering of the Trade Show, we came across an adorable animated panda named Gochan. This panda, a Japan native, is an AI bot learning English and relies on visitors to the booth to have a conversation with it to better its understanding of the language.

I got to speak with Gochan, and it was great to see a responsive bot getting better at replying as people spoke to it. Gochan asks a series of questions ranging from your birth month to your favorite sport and player. Gochan understood, pronounced and spelled Jose Altuve correctly.

The bot takes all this info from your conversation and builds it into a final presentation: a rap.

Bots are coming, and they’re getting more charming and personable. Gochan confirmed that for me. I’ll head back to the Trade Show tomorrow and check out some more cool things.

Trust in Jounralism

After a quick break for lunch — and by quick, I mean 15 minutes from a food truck on the way to the JW Marriott — to learn about what news consumers want to increase trust in “the media.”

This panel directly parallels research I’m doing in a grad class (which has due dates during SXSW…), and I was excited to see some current research and trends happening with the topic.

Trust in the news media has been falling since a peak right after Watergate. It hit a recent low at 32 percent, and that sent Joy Mayer into action. She and her project, the Trusting News Project, visit newsrooms large and small, broadcast and text-based, to combat the public perception that the news media cannot be trusted.

Mayer conducted a series of research forays into this topic with both qualitative and quantitative. From this research, she presented several shocking statistics.

She said distrust of the news is higher among nonwhites than whites. Republicans distrust the media more than Democrats, though still a majority of both parties do not trust news. But as people are asked about “their media,” the media they read versus the collective as a whole, they rate them as trust worthy.

Mayer’s work focuses on developing techniques and training newsrooms how to foster relationships with readers and viewers to increase the level of trustworthiness. Methods range from engaging with the comments section, addressing people who complain about perceived bias and unethical reporting, and reporting with more transparency and organizing content in a way where readers understand what went into a story.

It was interesting to see a legitimate, research-based argument that the news is not trusted, and that it’s their responsibility to fix that perception.

See my other story for coverage of the TXST Innovation Lab at SXSW.

Hoping to see Eddy Cue of Apple tomorrow…we’ll see if I get in line in time.