spatialaudio
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'Fortnite' will add more audio cues to help you hunt rivals
Play enough Fortnite and you'll know that audio cues can make all the difference -- footsteps are your cue to get ready for a fight (or, let's be honest, run for the hills). To that end, Epic has offered a sneak peek at the development and testing of Season 6 spatial audio updates that could save your hide. It wants higher-frequency, higher-contrast footsteps that help you pinpoint someone's location, and better spatial audio cues for gliders. It also wants to provide more sounds for in-air movement that doesn't involve a glider, such as falling or launching off a Bouncer pad.
Skywalker Sound and the challenges of making audio for VR films
Lauded Mexican filmmaker Alejandro González Iñárritu, best known for his work on movies such as Birdman and The Revenant, last year nabbed a "special" Oscar award for his VR exhibition Carne y Arena. The virtual reality project, dubbed Flesh and Sand in English, takes viewers into a world where they can experience what it's like to be an immigrant trying to cross a border. As much as visuals were important to tell this story, one of Iñárritu's focus was to also to create the most immersive sounds -- which can be complicated when going from traditional film to a completely new medium like VR.
Oculus tweaks VR audio to seem closer and more realistic
Audio can be just as important as visuals if you want to make true-to-life VR experiences. That's why Oculus has introduced changes to the Rift SDK that give developers the power to make spatial audio as realistic as possible. One of the features the company added is called Near-Field head-related transfer function (HRTF). Ordinary HRTF is necessary to create a 3D audio experience, but it can only replicate how sounds would reach your ears from a meter away. This improved HRTF can mimic how sounds would reach your ears from a much closer distance. It can, for instance, make a whisper or the sound of a phone ringing as you bring it to your ears much more life-like.
Facebook opens up 360-degree livestreaming to everyone
One of the most useful things that Facebook has done with Oculus is (ironically) make it work on Samsung's GearVR and host 360 degree photos and videos that users can check out on the headset. The social network has now expanded that idea greatly with the wide launch of Live 360, a VR-like way for users to stream and consume live content. Provided you have the tech and bandwidth, the new app gives "your audience a chance to be in the moment through both place and time," Facebook says.
Google's Omnitone adds 3D audio to web-based VR
Realistic sounds can turn good VR experiences into great, truly immersive ones, and Google's new open source project can make that happen for web-based virtual reality. The technology, called Omnitone, uses a full-sphere surround sound technique called ambisonics. Simply put, it mimics how sounds are heard in reality. If a VR character is playing the piano, how you hear the music changes based on where you're looking -- turn your head (while wearing a VR headset, of course) away from the pianist, and you'll hear the music coming from behind. Since it's open source and has cross-browser support, anybody developing VR games and other experiences for the web can use it for their projects.
Facebook offers a free VR audio tool thanks to a buyout
Facebook isn't merely content to make a virtual reality camera rig and call it a day. The company has revealed that it acquired Two Big Ears, the creator of the VR audio app Spatial Workstation, and has set the software loose. As of now, Spatial Workstation is free -- anyone with a Mac (Windows support is coming) can produce immersive sound for their 360-degree videos. Support for the company's existing Pro and gaming products will phase out over 12 months, but you'll eventually see the gaming tech merged into the Facebook-owned software.
YouTube now streams 360-degree live video
You no longer have to watch canned footage if you want to enjoy YouTube's support for 360-degree video. YouTube is rolling out live 360-degree streaming, giving you a chance to watch that concert, surgery or special event as if you were there. It'll get its first big use with "select" performances at Coachella this coming weekend, but we'd expect it to take off anywhere that VR-like video works.
NTT DoCoMo's spatial audio tech provides superhuman hearing
Upon first read, we were inclined to believe that the words gracing our eyes here simply couldn't be true. But then we realized that this is NTT DoCoMo, and beyond the realm of feasibility is where this company resides. In a beautiful attempt to provide superhuman-like hearing to all Earthlings, the company has developed a highly efficient mobile spatial audio transmission technology that enables "a mobile phone user to assign a spatial position to each sound source when listening to multiple sound sources, such as during a game or a conference call." Put simply, the tech allows a user listening with headphones to "hear each speaker's voice as if it were coming from a unique direction, creating a virtual face-to-face communication environment." We're not told specifically how many voices the average bird can hear before it becomes too overwhelming, but we'll go out on a limb here and say three or four, max.
