Hacker News Reader

Comment by throwaway287391 | Hacker News Reader

I'm surprised spatial audio is a selling point for anyone on a product this expensive. Have you tried it? I have AirPods Pro and I spent £6 on a month of Disney+ just to try out the spatial audio feature when it came out (which already felt fairly ridiculous but what can I say, the HN comments were too enticing). I used it for 5 minutes, rotated my head around a bunch to maximize the effect, thought "hm, that's pretty neat" and then went on with my month never using it again. It really felt like a gimmick to me but I'm wondering if I'm missing something now...

View on HN

For me the biggest downside of spatial audio is that it's iphone or ipad only. You have to choose between a big sound or a big image, but you can't get both. If I had spatial audio on my imac, I would consider it a valuable feature. Now it's mostly a gimmick.

Yeah, this is a large part of the reason I don't see myself using it much either -- if I'm at home watching video it's almost always on a TV screen. Also, I don't understand why it's still only supported by a couple streaming video services (none of which I personally use) -- Netflix already has Dolby surround audio in many of their videos, so shouldn't it be pretty easy to enable spatial audio in their iOS app? Well, clearly not, but I don't understand why.

Unfortunately, I haven't been able to try it out yet. I'm not particularly interested in the TV watching use case (I don't watch TV), but I think that there could be some cool AR use cases that I would love to play around with.

Such as a Zombies Run sort of game where you could hear the zombies behind you, or approaching from other streets. Not sure if any such applications exist yet, though?

Interesting, thanks -- I hadn't thought about using it for games but I could see how it might be more interesting for interactive stuff. I'm not sure if there are any iOS games that support it yet but presumably it's possible? (Didn't find anything with a quick search.)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com