3D soundscape to updates your Facebook, Twitter

Washington, Oct 25 (ANI): AudioFeeds, software that provides 3D soundscape, could soon be alerting you, via your headphones, to updates on your social network and news feeds.

The software announces Facebook updates such as friend requests with watery sounds like drips, bubbles and splashes.

Bird calls are reserved for Twitter, while musical sounds such as a didgeridoo or wind chime alert you to news stories.

It achieves the 3D effect by adjusting the phase, or timing, of the sounds delivered to your left and right earphones.

"The idea is to tell you what is going on in your social networks in a non-intrusive manner," said co-developer Stephen Brewster of the University of Glasgow, UK.

"Rather than having to look at your phone all the time we have created a 3D sonification of social network and news feed alerts," he said.

AudioFeeds could be built into a cellphone app, according to Brewster.

The technology will be presented at the Association for Computing Machinery's Multimedia conference in Florence, Italy, next week. (ANI)