Sony Patents a Way to Place Remote Voices at Exact Spots in a Physical Room
When someone joins a meeting remotely, their voice seems to come from a speaker in the corner, not from the seat they'd actually be sitting in. Sony is patenting a system that figures out where a remote person would physically be and makes the sound appear to come from that exact spot.
What Sony's virtual sound placement system actually does
You're in a conference room with six colleagues, and a seventh person is joining from home. Their voice booms out of a single wall speaker, which makes it weirdly hard to track who's talking or feel like they're really in the room with you.
Sony's patent describes a system that solves that. It tracks where everyone is in the physical room and where the remote person is in their own space, then figures out where that remote person would be sitting if the two rooms were merged into one. It then drives a speaker array, a row or grid of speakers working together, to make the sound appear to come from that virtual seat, not just from the nearest hardware box.
The result is that when the remote person talks, you hear their voice coming from the right direction, just as if they were sitting across the table from you. It's the kind of spatial audio trick that home theater systems use for movie surround sound, applied here to everyday communication.
a position information acquisition unit that acquires position information of a first target object in a first space in which a speaker array is arranged and position information of a second target object in a second space; …
Translation: The system tracks where people and speakers are located in two different rooms.
How wavefront synthesis pins sound to a virtual position
The system has three main pieces working together.
- Position tracking: A position information unit collects location data for people in the physical room (the "first space") and for the remote participant in their own space (the "second space").
- Virtual seat assignment: A processing unit then calculates a "fusion space," a virtual merged version of both rooms, and determines where the remote person's position in their space maps to inside the merged layout.
- Speaker array steering: An output control unit feeds audio from the remote person through a wavefront synthesis filter (a mathematical technique that shapes how multiple speakers fire together so the combined sound waves arrive at your ears as though they came from a specific point in space) and drives each speaker in the array individually to produce that effect.
Wavefront synthesis is worth unpacking. Rather than just panning audio left or right, it controls the timing and intensity of each speaker in an array so the sound "appears" to originate from a chosen point, even if you're standing far from the speakers. Sony's application of this is to pin remote participants to calculated virtual positions so the spatial cue matches where a listener's brain expects that voice to come from.
The patent describes handling multiple remote participants simultaneously, each placed at their own virtual position in the merged space.
… a position determination processing unit that determines a virtual position of the second target object in a first fusion space obtained by virtually fusing the second space to the first space; …
Translation: It figures out where a remote person's voice should seem to sit inside your local room.
What this means for hybrid meetings and shared spaces
If you've ever struggled to follow a group meeting because every remote voice comes from the same speaker regardless of who's talking, this addresses that directly. Spatial separation, hearing one voice to your left and another to your right, is something your brain uses automatically to track conversations. Collapsing all remote participants into one speaker location strips that cue away and makes large hybrid meetings exhausting.
Sony's run of spatial audio filings suggests the company is building toward professional conferencing and immersive communication tools, not just consumer entertainment. Whether this ends up in a conference room product, a broadcasting system, or something else entirely, the underlying problem it's solving, making remote people feel present in a shared physical space, is one that every organization running hybrid work arrangements deals with every day.
Sony's 14th filing in the Audio patents we've tracked since May joins earlier work on a dual-coil speaker driver and a per-ear sound layering approach.
The payoff for an ordinary user here is pretty concrete: a meeting where you can tell, just by listening, which direction a remote voice is coming from. That's a small thing that turns out to matter a lot when you're in a room with ten people and three of them are calling in.
The technology itself, wavefront synthesis, has existed in research and high-end audio installations for decades. What Sony is claiming is a specific method for computing where to place remote participants using live position data from both rooms and then driving that synthesis system in real time.
This isn't a consumer headphone trick. It requires a speaker array installed in the room, which means the near-term audience is corporate conference rooms, broadcast studios, or large-scale telepresence setups, not home offices. For the people who do use those environments, it could make a real difference.
There are more where this came from
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The drawings
36 drawing sheets from US 2026/0261814 A1 · click any drawing to enlarge
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