A Quick Listen With Bluetooth Auracast: Like a Hotspot, But for Audio

pcmag.com:

BARCELONA—You can think of Bluetooth Auracast(Opens in a new window) as a wireless replacement for the volume-up button that brings the bonus feature of not annoying every uninterested party within earshot. 

This upcoming feature, still months away from discoverability on consumer gadgets, lets a device broadcast synchronized audio to devices within typical Bluetooth range. The users of those devices can choose an Auracast stream to jump on, as if it were one Wi-Fi hotspot signal among many, and then listen via their own earphones. 

In a restaurant just outside of MWC here, the Bluetooth Special Interest Group hosted a demo of Auracast to show how it could work in four possible use cases.

The one with the most obvious appeal involved the scenario of a sports bar with multiple games on, where Auracast would allow any one fan to pick a channel without subjecting everybody else in the place to their taste in teams. I flipped between streams of a basketball game and a soccer match, with the review phone taking about 3 seconds to jump on a stream each time.

A demo station that invited visitors to imagine they were in the back of an auditorium straining to hear a speaker also made sense. In a situation like this, Auracast could also allow for multiple language translations. 

I found an airport-gate demo to be less intriguing. If I want to get a heads-up about when my flight starts boarding, a push notification from an airline app can get that job done without filling my ears with the usual litany of boarding announcements. 

Meanwhile, a demo of using Auracast to share a movie’s audio with multiple people—the underlying specification places no limit(Opens in a new window) on the number of receiving devices—seemed like an easy