Inside Oculus Video, or Virtual Desktop, or Whirligig, or SteamVR Desktop Theater, there are options to watch movies in a virtual "movie theater" or "home theater" or drive-in theater, or some other fantastical location.
Now, presumably in most real-life theaters, there are speakers:
Center speaker(s) behind the screen
front left and front right speakers
rear left and rear right speakers
and a subwoofer
Typical 5.1 surround.
So why can't the developers/programmers of these virtual theaters:
Parse the audio stream (Dolby Digital, DTS, DTS-HD, etc.)
Map each track of the stream to a discrete virtual speaker source in the virtual environment (home theater, movie theater, etc.)
Utilize head transform data to spatialize audio accordingly.
7.1, or Dolby Atmos, or whatever other speaker arrays could translate just as well, too - as long as the encoding was parseable.
If VLC can do it, I can't see why a VR player couldn't. Audacity uses ffmpeg to split apart a movie's surround sound encoding, and that's a free project. There are free decoders for the major formats:
This seems like a no-brainer. Is it really that complex to implement, or am I missing something? Are there licensing issues holding this back? It's all seemingly right in the documentation direct from Oculus already.
