Three new blog posts for High Fidelity popped up this morning.

Paloma’s javascript project is one. It is about a 17 year old intern at HyFy. Using JavaScript she was able to program what basically is sound bars that react to her singing with no perceptible lag.

High Fidelity’s AKA covers “Easy” is a blog post with a video, they say they will tell us more later. I suppose it is kinda neat… blah…

Measuring the speed of sound is a post about HyFy’s obsession with eliminating latency, lag. Right now they are dealing with sound and measuring the speed of sound in various media they list as Skype and cell phones.

Of course that really isn’t measuring ‘sound’. It is measuring how fast these mediums can translate sound to digital form, transmit it, and convert back to analog sound for your ears. The trick for HyFy is to figure out how sound is behaving in the real world and at least duplicate that in their virtual world.

The point is cell phones don’t really need to convey a sense of presence. A half second delay in such a conversation just means people tend to start talking over each other. But, we do that in real life too. So, we don’t consider it a deal or even take much notice of it.

They show Skype is a bit better and there is the video feed to sync up. But, we still don’t take much notice of it here.

With HyFy they want to maximize the sense of presence. So, all the electronic delays have to be minimized to the point they give us the experience we have when we are face to face talking. All the testing is telling them what the system has to do performance-wise to achieve that. It sounds like they can pretty much do it.