Hacker News Reader

Comment by psykotic | Hacker News Reader

> What I think will be the killer feature over Occulus Rift is that Project Morpheus has 60 virtual speakers, which (from the liveblog commentary) could lead to audio taking a bigger part in gaming.

With old fashioned two-speaker headphones and binaural recording, you can already achieve a surprising level of audio spatialization: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8IXm6SuUigI

View on HN

Currently, headphones are pretty much required hardware for VR, because the positions of the speakers relative to the ears are fixed. Achieving realistic binaural audio with external speakers isn't currently feasible because of the need to compensate for reflections and interference, let alone maintaining positionally invariant virtualized audio sources through head rotations and translations.

I'm not sure how the "60 virtual speakers" would work (it sounds like marketing terminology), but currently, the state-of-the-art in immersive in-game audio involves constructing an acoustically realistic head model, and harnessing the raytracing abilities of game engines and graphics cards to apply a material-based frequency attenuation curve at each bounce.

You can do it with a very large number of speakers and phase differences but headphones is much easier.

Actually, with two speaker headphones you can achieve any level of spatialization perceivable by human ears.

This must be true because although our ears are funny shapes, they only have one ear drum each, so we hear in stereo.

Yerp. Games just don't simulate it very well. People are hyperfocused on graphics and nobody pays attention to audio.

However I seem to recall Creative acquiring some audio company that had products with superior audio positioning technology, & basically axed the other product in favour of EAX or whatever its called..? Could be wrong

Aureal http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aureal_Semiconductor Creative bancrupted them with legal cost while at the same time using their patented tech without paying.

I have Diamond Sonic Impact 90 (Vertex AU8820) next to me on the wall :/ That was and is my best sound card to date.

Wow, it's so great that patents are here to protect the little guys from the big guys. Imagine, without patents, Creative might have just ripped off Aureal instead of ripping them off and suing them to death.

The vast majority of speakers and headsets usually have abysmally bad technical specifications, even those sold at inflated prices.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com