Spatial Audio in VR

Back in the day 'spatial audio' was excellent for what it was in VRML, as played through the SGI viewer. I was sad VRML never happened as I quite enjoyed worlds where you could play different songs in different virtual rooms able to mix albeit not to the beat between different tracks by moving around. A fantastic music experience could be had.

This new take on 3D audio just makes me want to go back to 1998 and what was achievable then in 3D on the web if you were willing to do a 20Mb download over a modem to get the plugin required to 'see' VRML. The actual hurdle was use case, instead of a 3D web we ended up with a 2D flat table web. If you got good at VRML and used all of the features and built significant sized worlds then you soon realised that you were on your own, few others in the world had got that far, their models were more like Duplo Lego rather than Lego Technical.

The alleged 'bar' back then was the download for the plugin, that allegedly prevented VRML from catching on. The authorship tools were awesome - Maya like - and yet there were few takers. CosmoWorlds was awesome, has to be said. The lack of content creators was the problem, 2D Flash was the way people went, nobody was thinking in 3D.

So when can we start doing cool 3D just on the web in a web browser that you don't need specialist hardware for? With 3D spatial audio working too?

Nice to see audio finally getting the attention it deserves! And seems like VR is the driving factor. I wonder how this compares to NVIDIA VRWorks Audio[1]?

When you think about it, 3D audio has many similarities to 3D video: rays of sound(/light) traveling through open space and attenuating in the process, bouncing off surfaces whose material filters different frequencies. From this point of view, in hindsight, the accelerated sound cards from ’00s seem a bit of a misstep – isn’t this something that’s better computed on a GPU?

[1] http://www.roadtovr.com/nvidias-vrworks-audio-brings-physica...