[caption id="attachment_14817" align="alignright" width="325"] One of the scenes from Sightline: The Chair[/caption] One of the busiest developers on the scene right now, Tomáš Mariančík (aka Frooxius), has just released a new version of his hit VR experience 'Sightline: The Chair' with added integration with 3DCeption, a "real-time binaural synthesis engine". We asked him for his thoughts on 3DCeption and the importance of convincing positional audio in VR. New 'Sightline: The Chair' Release Sports 3DCeption Powered Binaural Audio I'm fairly certain that Tomáš Mariančík doesn't really sleep. After first appearing on VR the scene with the 'gaze based' puzzler Sightline as part of IndieCade's first VR Jam, he made a serious splash with the followup VR experience Sightline: The Chair, before moving on to experimenting with Leap Motion on Project Comenius. See Also: 'World of Comenius’ Demonstrates Powerful Educational Interaction with Leap Motion and Oculus Rift After Oculus recently licensed Realspace Audio as part of the new integrated audio system in the Crescent Bay feature prototype, VR audio seems to have started receiving the attention it deserves. Now, Tomáš has revisited The Chair, supercharging its audio with a positional engine called 3DCeption, from Edinburgh based company Two Big Ears, and we wanted to hear about VR audio and its importance from a developer's perspective. Download Sightline: The Room Despite the raw power of gaming hardware increasing exponentially with every generation, in-game audio has failed to evolve in line with the visuals it accompanies. "..it's quite saddening to see that a lot of games still have quite primitive sound, despite improving the visuals. But I think VR could reawaken the need for more realistic sound to achieve higher immersion." says Mariančík. So, what was 3DCeption like to work with? "The Chair was pretty straightforward, their API is easy to use. There were several issues I had, but all of them got resolved - [the] 3DCeption guys are very communicative, they both gave me advice and fixed bugs or made changes to the library based on my feedback, which helped the process a lot." Part of the skill inherent designing a compelling game is creating and directing the user's experience within your world, audio is of course a huge part of this. "[with positional audio] I can even use this to draw someone's attention to an object behind them, force them look behind by just hearing or above them." Mariančík tells me. "Higher sound realism allows to create more realistic scenarios in VR - like in a game you can tell that something made a sound behind you, forcing you to look - for example an enemy player in multiplayer game." "With classic stereo panning '3D sound' that's in Unity by default, you can only tell if the sound is coming from the right or left, but you can't tell well if it's in front of you or behind you or even above you or below you. With 3DCeption and other binaural solutions that model how the sound spreads through the environment and how its frequency characteristics as well as timings are affected by reaching your ears from different directions (the way our ears are shaped on the head in the path of the sound change how it sounds), so that allows to better differentiate where the sound is coming from." 'Whatever Happened to Aureal 3D?' - Continued on Page 2 Whatever Happened to Aureal 3D? So why has game audio technology stayed so static? Mariančík has a theory; "Of course there's still a way to go for the audio solutions - the problem is that a lot of the methods that allow for even more realistic sound (like the wavetracing, where you have another copy of the scene made from audio polygons with audio materials, instead of just a box) are covered with patents, so it kind of slows progress there." One of the first companies to pioneer progressive positional, natural sounding audio processing technology was Aureal Semiconductor. Their Aureal 3D system was to form the unique selling point of the company's Vortex line of PC sound cards in the late 90s. Singapore based Creative Technology were of course the heavyweights of the PC sound card back then with their Soundblaster product practically becoming synonymous with PC sound and music. Aureal's approach to enhance game audio was ambitious and impressive. Utilising geometry lifted from the game itself, Aureal 3D calculated the path sound waves travelled and how they reflected off surfaces in the virtual world before reaching your avatar's position in that world. It was one of the first uses of HRTF (Head-related transfer functions), a somewhat unhelpful acronym which refers to methods your brain uses to detect audio delays in the environment and property changes that your brain uses to judge relative distance between it and the sound's source. ITD (Inter-aural Time Delay: the correlation of time delay between sounds reaching each of our ears) and HRTF are used by our brains to build a surprisingly accurate aural landscape of the world. Unsurprisingly, emulating these cues can be extremely effective at convincing the brain it's somewhere it's not. Also unsurprisingly, the workload to calculate audio like this is higher than just slapping on some DSP effects. One of the original demonstrations of Aureal 3D can be be heard in the video below - best watched using headphones. By contrast, Creative's competing EAX (Environmental Audio Extensions) technology was a much simpler, less pure and less effective approach. Early EAX was essentially a collection of DSP algorithms which emulated reverberation in a very generalised way. So, sound was processed based on this one preset per 'room' but none of the objects within them. Most games opted to use pre-baked presets for different environment types, which lead to lazy and inaccurate implementations in games of the time. Creative, recognising Aureal had a product that could challenge its dominance, launched a lawsuit claiming Aureal had infringed patents in March of 1998. This is a snippet from an Aureal press release at the time: The suit alleges that Aureal’s Vortex 8820 AC’97 Digital Audio Processor infringes United States Patent No. 5,342,990 entitled "Digital Sampling Instrument Employing Cache-Memory" which describes a specific implementation for an electronic musical instrument designed by E-MU Systems, Inc. Aureal counter-sued Creative and ultimately won the case. Sadly though,crippling legal costs forced the firm into bankruptcy, leaving the predatory Creative to acquire Aureal in its entirety. Creative then shut its one time competitor down, burying most of its technology. It's a fairly sad tale of superior technology being beaten by sheer corporate muscle and an apt reminder that in the world of technology, the best ideas are not always the ones which gain a foothold in our every day lives. 3DCeption - Optimised Positional Audio Engine 3DCeption is an immersive audio engine from Edinburgh based technology company Two Big Ears. Founded in 2013, their focus is on providing positional and 3D audio solutions for mobile and 'emerging technologies', labels that can both be applied to virtual reality. Their 3DCeption engine and API is available as a plugin for the popular Unity 3D game engine and the company claims that their engine, currently in beta, is up to 4 times faster than competing engines on the market now. Co-Founder Varun Nair, veteran Sound Designer of 7 years and over 400 projects, had this to say about the future for game audio, and in particular VR: I’m sure the technology for audio in VR is going to progress far — we are hard at work and so are all the other players. But, we are very keen to see and help progress the sound design language for VR. There’s so much to explore. The beta plugin is currently available free for a limited time to developers interested in giving it a whirl, which is an encouraging incentive to try and get more companies and developers integrating compelling positional audio in their games, especially ones based in VR. Our thanks to Tomas for his time and his thoughts. You can find more on Sightline over at the website here. Two Big Ears and 3DCeption can be found here.