Sound Design for Rift

You don't record sounds for the Rift, just as you don't record clips for the Rift. You just record your samples as normal and then play them using 3d sound library, such as OpenAL, just make sure to account for head's orientation and velocity along with it's position. That's it.

Just to clarify: if you haven't programmed sound yet, you should first do some major tutorials. It's ain't simple, to say the least.

Integrating into foreign engine might be easy if you do it hackish, might be extremely hard down to impossible if you try to do everything properly without breaking foreign engine, if latter is overly complicated.

Hey, thanks for the reply.

I will be using Binaural recording and as such would like to implement this into an experience for rift.

I will take a look at 3d sound library and ideally, I will get someone else to do the programming as part of a portfolio project. i am buying rift first and foremost so that I can experience its true capabilities before designing ideas for its use with sound for immersion. I will be looking at plenty of tutorials on the programming side of things too.

Thanks for the advice.

Binaural recordings don't really work in games because they are recorded from a fixed perspective. As soon as you move your head the audio won't match the orientation that it was recorded from. You need standard clean recordings fed into a HRTF sound engine that will recreate the binaural effect synthetically.

Binaural recordings may work with a static video feed, but that totally negates the benefits of the Rift.

Binaural recordings are definitely the way to go, there was someone a few months back on the forums that made a nice audio engine for unity that applied binaural processing to stereo audio files, but I can't seem to find the link. :(

"Ninjashifter" wrote:
Binaural recordings are definitely the way to go, there was someone a few months back on the forums that made a nice audio engine for unity that applied binaural processing to stereo audio files, but I can't seem to find the link. :(

I'm guessing you're referring to this one:







I would love to know if he's ever released his audio engine, it showed a lot of promise!

Binaural sound design/tracking very much possible with the oculus rift headset. The only thing is that you have to use speakers. So for a theater or seat it's perfect, but not at all for headphones. With speakers, if you turn head to the left you will be facing the sound on your left, and that's great. The problem is with headphones. In that case, if you turn your head to the left you still have the sound on your left... meaning that you will never reach it ! So to integrate a 'static' binaural sound clip you have to have a counter polar (counter axis) approach. Which means : all pictures going left propulses the sound to the right. Get it ? The best technology to compensate for this without having to learn complex interactive audio integration ( in sometimes almost hostile software environments ), is the hair dryer helmet under which you keep you goggles. Much easier.

http://www.sectr.co/audio.html

This guy has a suite of tools for Unity Developers and has a spatial 3d audio solution




I havent started playing with audio in unity yet and was wondering if any of you are familiar with this and if this is a good solution to consider.

Also assuming i use a solution like this, will standard audio clips be fine to use to achieve good spatial audio or will i need to customize/record clips in advance to use for effective spatial audio?

For Guided Meditation we used binaural audio for all elements.

How we handled it was stripped the left and right sound channels into separate audio sources and placed them in position within the scene. This allowed for default view to have correct binaural audio, but when the head moved it changed and was positioned appropriately. Definitely a hack, but it really tricked the brain nicely.

We're still trying to find binaural environment audio for new meditation areas, but below is a framework we've been playing with when we cannot.




More info on their site here.

From our experience, we haven't needed to customize audio to work specifically here. It just works. :)

thankyou...goign to check out your links while i eat some cake...nom nom...

Wondered where you got to after eating cake.. and from others:
I'm researching project where we want to (360deg) film an amazing architectural environment (i.e. real, not modelled). Then marry a sound design with this footage for Oculus Rift playback and ideally with headphones.
I must point out: I'm a sound designer (not in game design), not a 3D environment games programmer, so my knowledge of Unity for instance is bugger all.

The question is how do you go about this?
- Does it require making a 3D model of the real environment filmed and then mapping sound into it like with Sectr?
- and if so how do you marry the footage with the sound and the viewers orientation.
- I'm not proposing to figure this out alone, but any guidance pointers of what's involved would be much appreciated.
thanks