Google announced today that spatial audio support has been added to its Unity and Android Cardboard SDK developer kits.
This means developers no longer have to play sounds from the left and right in separate speakers. Cardboard app developers are now able to create apps and games that feature sound the way we actually hear it in the real world.
“Human beings experience sound in all directions – like when a fire truck zooms by, or when an airplane is overhead. Starting today, the Cardboard SDKs for Unity and Android support spatial audio, so you can create equally immersive audio experiences in your virtual reality (VR) apps. All your users need is their smartphone, a regular pair of headphones, and a Google Cardboard viewer,” writes Nathan Martz, Google Cardboard product manager, in a recent blog post.
The low-cost VR platform’s new SDK combines the location of the wearer’s head with the position of sound, allowing sounds that come from the right to make it to the left ear with a slight delay. In the context of virtual reality, this ensures Google Cardboard’s sound now more sense.
Spacial audio will reportedly have little impact on the CPU performance of smartphones and has been optimized for modern CPUs. The details of Google’s new Cardboard spatial audio SDK can be found in the company’s recent Google Developers blog post about the technology.
[source]Google[/source][via]AndroidCentral[/via]
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