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Besides standardising NVME storage for games to rely on, I'm the most excited about SONY's HRTF [1] implementation for the PS5 [2]. It's something I've been waiting for years for someone to implement for computer games, and it could be a game changer for audio. Listen to this [3] with good headphones to see (well, hear) what I'm talking about, better with higher volume.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Head-related_transfer_function

[2] https://youtu.be/sSmWIR-D6ro?t=2526

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WYdIidUIbAs

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PC gaming had positional audio with not just HRTF's but also reflections raytraced in the 90s from Aureal. These chips/cards were indeed quite high quality, and reasonably priced at the time.

Aureal was sued into bankruptcy by a patent lawsuit from Creative. Creative was able to buy the company out of bankruptcy court, before the patent case was even resolved, and promptly shuttered it, along with removing all drivers and support materials from the internet. Their competing hardware at the time was considerably inferior: just a reverb filter with some tuning knobs.

Patent lawsuit by Creative over technology Creative copied from Aureal :/

Carmack intended to implement pure software 3D audio in Doom 3, but Creative threatened with a patent lawsuit over stencil shadows. Result was EAX support.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doom_3#Release

I didn't know that one. Sigh. Creative truly is a loathsome company.

To add to that, you can now emulate EAX on any sound card via OpenAL Soft[1] and DSOAL[2]. Effectively turning any old game into HRTF. You can even run your custom HRTF profiles.

[1] https://www.openal-soft.org/ [2] https://github.com/kcat/dsoal

>Aureal was sued into bankruptcy

Well they won the lawsuit. But the Lawsuit cost was way too high. Not to mention Sound Card wasn't that important at the time, and PC Gaming Market was Tiny, as compared to today. Even Creative themselves lose as market shift to RealTek Audio.

I am said all these great thing happened in the 90s, 3DFx and Glide, along with Aureal 3D all lost.

HRTF technology for computer games has been available since the 90s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aureal_Semiconductor#A3D

Not nearly at the level that the PS5 is promising. They quote a computational requirement that's equivalent to 2 Ryzen cores.

HRTF is now quite common with VR games since it's guaranteed that you'll be using headphones. I've had to implement it for a couple of titles and the result is quite nice as the audio positioning matches your head movement.

I might have missed something but they say the HRTF is unique per-person. They mention collecting the pattern from one person using specialized equipment but then just straight to "using an HRTF".

How does this apply to a consumer console like the PS5? Are they going to sample a lot of people and use some sort of average? Or is there some way to define it per-listener?

No, they'll have a set of pre-made HRTFs and then use a listening test to pick the most appropriate one for the user

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ph8LyNIT9sg

While HRTFs are unique per person, there's still a lot of similarity. You can use a "one size fits all" HRTF and still get quite good results, and a small menu of options is essentially sufficient.

Exactly, interestingly I remember Michael Abrash recounting when he was demoed personalized HRTF for the first time. They put headphones on him and sat him in a chair. A person started walking around him in circles holding a small speaker. But it was obviously a trick, the sound didn't come from the speaker but the headphones - but according to his account it was indistinguishable from the real thing. He was astounded when the person walking around him stopped but the audio remained circling around him. Personalized HRTF is a game changer.

I wonder if we could hack/mod the airpod pro to gain access to their internal microphone, we could use it to create our own HRTF head model, probably what apple is doing to enable their version of spatial audio

Counter strike has HRTF. It’s nice.

For games? I wish it could be used for movies.

I'd buy a PS5 just to be able to watch movies if it had a good surround to HRTF conversion.

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