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Some clarification please: Oculus Audio and Unreal Engine for Quest

virtualHCG
Expert Protege
I would like to please request some clarification from Oculus staff regarding the use of Oculus Audio in Unreal Engine (Oculus integration 4.23) for the Quest. Is this actually possible and supported? I keep finding posts everywhere stating that it doesn't work so I wonder if what I'm hearing is spatialization being done by Unreal's built in engine or if it's actually Oculus Audio. It's confusing that Oculus Audio is not available under the drop down menu in the Android settings and the documentation shows that it should be enabled in the Windows settings. I can see that there's an Android armeabi-v7a library in UnrealEngine\Engine\Source\ThirdParty\Oculus\LibOVRAudio\LibOVRAudio\lib\armeabi-v7a as well as an APL.xml file that copies the library to the Android package so I'm assuming it's being used. On the other hand Oculus warns users that non 64 bit apps will be rejected and there's no 64 bit LibOVRAudio available for Android (arm64-v8).

What's the actual status?

Thanks!

6 REPLIES 6

virtualHCG
Expert Protege
I've contacted Oculus support directly and also gotten zero answers. After spending hours digging into Unreal Engine's source I found that the Android implementation of Oculus Audio is not complete. The plugin is not even whitelisted for the platform to be packaged with the builds. It is a bit misleading that the official UE4 development documentation for Quest states that Oculus Audio is a solution for that platfrom (see here: https://developer.oculus.com/documentation/quest/latest/concepts/unreal-audio/ ) but there's no actual code implementation that makes it possible. The Android library libovraudio32.so is present but is never used or packaged with the APK and if Android is manually added to the plugin's whitelist the application fails to build.

Due to this misinformation I've wasted a few days of project development that relies heavily in high quality sound spatialization (which Oculus Audio is able to deliver, at least on desktop platforms), so it would be great if the documentation is amended to reflect reality.

motorsep
Rising Star
Welcome aboard  😞

virtualHCG
Expert Protege
I just can't believe the degree of unresponsiveness from Oculus towards the developers. Days pass and I can't find an answer to this issue. I actually got to ask one of Epic's audio developers and he basically said they don't know why Oculus Audio is not working on Quest and that it's Oculus' responsibility to deal with this since they just get the plugin code from them. This lack of response through the different channels (here, GitHub issues and direct support request) make it feel almost like this is "abandonware", which contrasts sharply with how they talk about and market their platform and devices to the end consumer.
Maybe @NinjaGG can help?

Slin
Expert Protege
I've also been trying to use it in my own custom game engine. It works great on PC and mac, however the android version of the plugin is built against a c++ standard library that has been removed from the android NDK about a year ago and is not compatible with the newer one. I've spent a couple of days trying to make it work somehow, but I don't think it will without oculus updating it. I've asked support about it a few months ago and they told me to get back to me about it but never did. I sent another request last week and didn't get an answer at all yet.
The spatializer is quite great if it works, but currently it looks like I need to move on and use something else instead. Developer support has been great in the past, but on this issue it's been very disappointing (I actually asked them for a 64 bit version of it for android and they delivered it a week later, but that was in March).

motorsep
Rising Star
So basically you are saying that x64 Audio SDK isn't supported on Android ? I assume 32bit one works just fine ?

virtualHCG
Expert Protege

motorsep said:

So basically you are saying that x64 Audio SDK isn't supported on Android ? I assume 32bit one works just fine ?


There is only a 32 bit armv7 library present in the engine but as I said before, Android is not whitelisted in the Oculus Audio plugin definition file by default and manually doing it causes compilation errors that I haven't had the time to fix (maybe those errors are related to the NDK incompatibility that @Slin mentioned). So unless Oculus fixes their UE4 integration it is really up to us to hack the fixes out.