The Subpac tactile bass system gave me one of the most viscerally immersive experiences of my life, and it really blew my mind. I felt like it was feeling the pounding bass on the level of a dance club, but yet nobody around me could hear a thing.
I had a chance to demo a new SubPac designed specifically for VR on the streets of San Jose after a SVVRCon party. Lead Bass Officer Zach Jaffe was doing some guerrilla marketing giving VR developers demos, and it was one of the most immersive experiences I had at SVVRCon — and I wasn’t even using a VR HMD.
SubPac is simply takes the audio output of any audio and it converts the frequencies from 5Hz to 130Hz and converts it into vibrations in their wearable device. Your ears have difficulty hearing frequencies that low, and so we’re left to feel it in our body.
Zach told me that there’s some VR manufacturers who call SubPac one of their favorite VR peripherals just because it’s so elegant and easy to implement. You just literally feed the audio track that’s already in the experience into the SubPac receiver, and then put on the wearable unit. And that’s it. No SDK or any other specific integration is needed. And yet the benefits of immersion and presence of using something like the SubPac are going to be pretty incredible.
I’m really looking forward to hearing more about the VR-specific products from SubPac, and I’d highly recommend trying to find a demo of it at your next VR meetup. It’s really one of the most transformative experiences I’ve had in VR, and it speaks to the power of being able to use sound as a source of haptic feedback. #spreadBass
Become a Patron! Support The Voices of VR Podcast Patreon
Theme music: “Fatality” by Tigoolio
Subscribe to the Voices of VR podcast.
Rough Transcript
[00:00:05.452] Kent Bye: The Voices of VR Podcast.
[00:00:12.455] Zach Jaffe: I'm Zach Jaffe. I am the lead bass officer at Subpac. It is a physical dimension of sound experience for all audio-related things. So whether you're a music maker, which is where we started in the production world, music listener, or in our case, VR user or developer, you're able to take low frequencies from 130 Hz to 5 Hz and transmit them directly into the user's body so they get a full immersion in sound.
[00:00:44.048] Kent Bye: Yeah, I got the chance to try this last night on the outside of the after party, and it really blew my mind in terms of how much immersion I got just from the feeling of the bass. And the crazy thing is that nobody was hearing anything at all, so it's just sort of like this rumble that's happening. So maybe you could talk a bit about the technology as to what's actually happening to be able to create this type of experience.
[00:01:05.361] Zach Jaffe: Yeah, so we use some special vibro-tactile membranes along with the transducers inside the sub-pack, which are dispersing the sound in a way that keeps it silent. So there's no external noise aside from, you know, very low buzzing, essentially. You know, if you have it turned up all the way and maybe someone's standing next to you, they might hear something where it sounds like a car is rolling down the street with 12-inch subs in the back, you know, six blocks away. But, you know, it's not something that's going to bother you. So, you know, if you're somebody who's gaming or playing VR super late at night, then you're not gonna have to worry about making your neighbors angry, or your parents, or your roommates, or your brothers and sisters, or grandparents, or whoever it is you live with. You know, nobody does anything like that super early in the day when they're working and everything like that, so they want to blast their systems at night, and this not only will give you, you know, full immersion in the virtual space, but, you know, not gonna bother anyone while you're doing it, and it's the most pure way to experience bass, because bass is very physical. Low frequencies are felt. When you go to a concert and stand in front of the stage, that's what you're feeling. You're feeling the air moving. So we're replicating that, except instead of having to deal with your ears, you're also using your body as the monitoring source, essentially.
[00:02:17.963] Kent Bye: And so it feels like there's quite a bit of fidelity from the 5 hertz up to 130 that even with the baselines that I experienced that there did seem to be that conveyance of that spectrum. It wasn't just sort of a single frequency, I guess. And so how are you able to kind of do that range to kind of recreate what it feels like to do those frequencies?
[00:02:35.865] Zach Jaffe: So it's interesting that you say that because it will feel like you're experiencing the kick at 130 Hz and then a sub, you know, down at 20 to 5 Hz on different parts of your back. So 130 being the top of your back and 5 being the lower part of your back. However, the way in where most of our IP lies is the way we have the transducers and membranes configured so that you feel it that way, but you're not actually, in reality, feeling the sub-pack do something different. The pistons are firing at the same time. However, your body interprets low frequencies like that. You feel 130 Hz at the top of your body and 5 Hz down in your hip girdle. That's just the way the human body interprets those frequencies when it's on your body.
[00:03:22.848] Kent Bye: And so you're actually physically doing it from the top to the bottom then, or is it all just the same?
[00:03:26.830] Zach Jaffe: So I'm saying it's all just the same, but your body interprets it that way. And you mentioned high fidelity. It is the most high fidelity way to experience low frequencies because you don't have to worry about the shape of a room or standing waves. Sea waves are 10 plus feet long. So, no matter where you are, you're going to get the most accurate bass reproduction that you could possibly get, even if you had an ultimate $10,000 treated studio. You're still using your ears, which are inaccurate at frequencies below 100 Hz because of the issues I was just talking about, and because there's no gap between the sound and your ear. It's just going straight into your body. There's no distance between the vibration and you.
[00:04:07.392] Kent Bye: Yeah, it's probably one of the most visceral experiences I've ever had in my life, so it's pretty amazing. I'm looking forward to see what comes of this. Since you were showing it to people who are VR developers, what type of feedback were you getting in terms of what people would want to do with something like this, with the subpack?
[00:04:22.122] Zach Jaffe: We've had a few of the major VR hardware creators tell us it's their favorite peripheral for all of VR, because it's really idiot-proof right now. It's just line in, line out. They don't have to have any middleware. They don't have to download anything. There's nothing involved in its use. It's just plug it in and turn it on, adjust the frequency intensity. And there's so many different things happening in VR, from music experiences to gaming experiences. So we're going to be able to provide whatever your experience is, as long as you're properly mixing low-end in, which hasn't exactly happened yet. But there are some really sweet demos out there. Playhead by Innerspace has some proper low-end. If you've ever played that game, shout out to Balthazar and his crew for making that awesome demo. And it's just going to add that physical dimension, because reality is five senses. I mean, unless someone's going to stick a rose under your nose and spoon yogurt in your mouth, you're not going to smell or taste anything in VR. But seeing and hearing things, the brain can get confused, like, why am I not feeling anything? And I've had people tell us that they get nauseous when they use VR generally, but they don't when they use a sub-pack, because it grounds them. They're actually getting the three most important senses to replicate reality.
[00:05:41.180] Kent Bye: So yeah, it's a pretty elegant solution and just having to take the line out, male-to-male connector into the sub-pack and then from the sub-pack with headphones. And so that's basically it. It's that all you need is sort of a line out from your VR, HMD, either the gear or the PC and then plug it into the sub-pack and then your headphones into that and then you're good.
[00:06:01.519] Zach Jaffe: Exactly. Like I said, idiot-proof. Turn it on, plug it in, plug it out. You're good to go. And you're feeling all of your low frequencies and a fullness that you really, until now, hadn't been able to get in a personal experience. You had to go to a Coachella and stand at the front of the main stage in order to get that experience or go to London Club Fabric and stand there at 4am feeling the floor move.
[00:06:22.881] Kent Bye: Yeah, and I know that the Converge guys were just talking about using for dance experiences and yeah, it really did feel like I was in a club. So, very awesome. Finally, what do you see as sort of like the ultimate potential for, you know, using this type of immersive technology and what it can do to help bring about more immersive experiences in VR?
[00:06:42.267] Zach Jaffe: Well, I think that adding the tactile, physical dimension of sound to VR experiences is going to make people rethink sound design, the way it's making people rethink music production in electronic music. Because this goes down to 5 hertz, which is below the audible range. Most people hear between 30 to 35 hertz before it becomes just a physical sensation, because your ears just aren't designed to hear those. So instead of, say, you're producing and mixing down your VR experience in headphones, you're definitely not going to be mixing those low, low frequencies because you simply can't hear them in headphones. And I know a lot of people work in headphones constantly when they're doing this. So I think that it's going to hopefully have a sea change in the way that people make sound in VR experiences, gaming. because they're going to be able to actually mix as low as possible and really focus those low frequencies in the best way for the listener. Make it as accurate and as, well in this case, feel good as possible.
[00:07:42.732] Kent Bye: Awesome. Anything else left unsaid you'd like to say? Spread bass. OK, great. Thank you. Thank you. And thank you for listening. If you'd like to support the Voices of VR podcast, then please consider becoming a patron at patreon.com slash Voices of VR.
