spatial audio for headphones

I believe Unity's 3D audio simply attenuates according to distance between the Audio Source and the Audio Listener (using a curve that you can adjust), as well as lets you fiddle with settings (Pan Level & Spread) to determine how much each ear will hear if you turn away from/toward the sound. Those settings have tooltips and probably at least a little documentation, but it's easy enough to see what's going on by trying it yourself.

I highly recommend using headphones but blocking off one of the speakers (cover it up or don't put it on your actual ear) to see what's happening. In many Unity demos, if I turn so that a sound source is on my left, my right ear hears absolutely nothing, which is super unrealistic (and annoying for me since I only have a working right ear to begin with). You can adjust the Pan/Spread (I forget the proper values) for that.

Hope that helps!

Im pretty sure Unity cant handle this very well at all, but maybe its possible to get it working a bit better at least.
Best would of course be a binaural solution for Unity (might be something coming soon *wink*).

have you checked out the FMOD studio package? They're offering it on their site - but I'm not sure if it will do what you're looking for (I haven't played with it yet).

Thanks for the input guys... I appreciate that! I've been using FMOD for unity for the past few weeks and it's working okay though I've only been working with stereo speakers up to this point, so I wanted to find out what the difference is with the headphones since the BP guide mentions how they require a different approach than using just regular speakers.

The guide mentions having the virtual mic's follow the orientation of the head movement and I was curious to know how others are going about it before I jump into it. Hoping to save a little trial-and-error time. ;)

An HRTC solution for Unity would sure be nice!

"vajra3d" wrote:

An HRTC solution for Unity would sure be nice!

Yeah if they'd ever release it! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2dzsVjn8hNc

Looking for a few selected to test binaural Unity integration, pm me if you are interested.
Big plus if you have a serious small/big project you are working on.

Ok, i have enough testers now, stay tuned for a post later in the wip section : )

I've just started experimenting with the Razer Tiamat 7.1 headphones and the initial results are very promising but I'd like to do some blind testing with someone that doesn't know where the sounds are coming from in the scene to make sure my brain isn't positioning the sounds for me because it knows where they're coming from.

7.1 is pretty nice, but still far away from Binaural audio : )

So I just wanted to follow up and mention that I haven't noticed any difference between using headphones and stereo speakers. They appear to function identically from what I can tell so I'm not sure what the BP guide is referring to unless it's meant for non-Unity devs maybe. Anyway thanks again for the helpful info!