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Skills needed for awesome Oculus Rift audio?
I work with a small team on some VR experiences. I have a couple of friends who work in the music / sound engineering industry and we want one of them to join us. Im an audio newbie and have no idea how involved producing audio for VR is.
What kind of skills / knowledge are beneficial for this role? What kind of stuff is an audio engineer for VR experiences doing?
Would be awesome if someone could shed some light on this.
What kind of skills / knowledge are beneficial for this role? What kind of stuff is an audio engineer for VR experiences doing?
Would be awesome if someone could shed some light on this.
1 Reply
- Its simpler in a lot of ways, instead of doing complex mixes of sound you want to separate them out into individual point sources, then just position them where they would be physically.
As an example, gunshot sounds often have multiple parts combined into one wav file: the blast, the working of the slide, tinkle of the shell casing, blast echo, etc. In VR, you would want to just leave those as individual sounds rather than mixing them together yourself, with sources coming from different places to match where the sound would actually be generated in real life. Blast coming from the tip of the barrel, ejection and chambering sounds coming from around the back of the gun, shell casing sound coming from the actual shell casing as it bounces around, and for the echo just use the reverb model of the audio engine so it can take the environment into account (sounds different indoors vs outdoors for instance).
Ambient effect loops make this even more critical. You need to make sure each part, from rustling leaves to blowing wind, are coming from the right place, not just playing a stereo mix. You won't immerse anyone by making leaf sounds come from from a pile of dirt.
The authoring becomes really simple this way, and more realistic, but this does mean you have to be careful about timing the playback of these different effects inside the game engine. So the skills that are most important are for making sure the audio sources position and timing closely match the visuals.
