Audiodice is an open source multidirectional speakers for immersive spaces.

Designed by Metalab, SAT’s R&D laboratory, the Audiodice system is a set of multidirectional speakers with 12 audio channels, whose vocation is to create immersive experiences of navigation in a real or virtual sound environment, with complete freedom of movement and orientation in space.

Audiodice was created as part of the ICSA and SAV+R projects initiated in 2019 by Metalab and financially supported by the Ministry of Economy and Innovation. ICSA aims to promote the development of the use of immersion in all types of places and SAV+R (pronounced like the French word “saveur”) has the ambition to study and implement a complete workflow of acoustic simulation for immersive spaces. These projects are part of one of Metalab’s first missions: the development of video, audio and authoring tools for the creation of immersive environments.

At the SAT, we are fortunate to have a unique space for sound immersion with the Satosphere. But we also receive requests from our partners to bring and adapt these immersive experiences in other places, which are not necessarily equipped with multichannel sound systems, especially for immersion. This gave rise to the idea of designing a spatialized sound system, rich enough to allow immersive audio navigation and offer a sound experience that goes beyond the stereophonic dimension. We have therefore created our own prototype loudspeaker that has twelve channels and allows the sound radiation to be configured in order to faithfully reproduce the spatialization of sound emissions. The sound system is compatible with SATIE, our audio spatialization software, and remains mobile, easy and quick to install.

While the listener is usually surrounded by the sound system, these new speakers allow the listener to wander freely around the sound sources, getting closer to them to hear them more clearly. By inviting the spectator to move in the middle of the loudspeaker array, audio spatialization is offered according to an inverted paradigm, opening new perspectives for sound and immersive scenography.

Immersive experience : Zack Settel, Nicolas Bouillot, Michal Seta

Audiodice : Nicolas Bouillot, Patrick Dupuis, Pierre-Antoine Chesnel, Michal Seta & Metalab

Extract translated from [SAT]’s website

Here follows a 5-minute presentation of the Audio Mostly 2023 paper entitled “Audiodice: an open hardware design of a distributed dodecahedron loudspeaker orchestra”: