6DOF Immersive Listening Allows You To Move Around Your Music
You may think you know immersive audio, but you haven’t heard a thing! Expanding beyond 5.1 or 7.1 surround sound, ambisonics and binaural audio has made a heavy impact on the way we are listening or consuming our entertainment. People have been blown away by the ability of sound to move around you and to hear music as you would a movie. But what about the ability for YOU to move around the music? In this article we are gonna highlight the work of the innovative Dear Reality Team in which they bring to us 3 unique tools that allow us, the listeners, to enter the room with our music.
Here you will learn how to transfer your object-based 3D audio mix from your DAW into the virtual environment by using the latest updates of DEAR VR SPATIAL CONNECT and DEAR VR UNITY together with DEAR VR PRO.
Applications
There are many benefits of transferring a 3D audio mix into the unity game engine:
- Augmented audio mixes for AR experience
- Linear audio objects for desktop or VR game (atmos, off-SFX, music)
- Audio objects for Videogrammetry scene to walk through
- Immersive 6DOF music experiences
What is 6DOF?
The concept of having an interactive audio scene in which you can wander around is called 6DOF. This abbreviation stands for ” six degrees of freedom”. A 3D audio mix in your DAW with 3D Spatializer plugins dearVR PRO or dearVR MUSIC already has 3 degrees of freedom. These words reference the three types of rotations of your head. However, you cannot wander around within your mix in this scenario.
By bringing the audio mix into the interactive world using dearVR SPATIAL CONNECT and dearVR UNITY this movement can finally be achieved. By transferring the audio mix into the game engine Unity we are now able to move the listener’s position in all three dimensions. This results in a unique new object-based 3D audio experience for our DAW mix with six degrees of freedom.
How to transfer a 3D Audio mix into The interactive Environment
1. Export audio and automations from your DAW
You will begin by creating your linear 3D audio mix in your DAW using dearVR PRO and dearVR SPATIAL CONNECT. When you are satisfied with the results of your linear 3DOF binaural mix you can export the dearVR PRO object position automations by pressing “record” in dearVR SPATIAL CONNECT and starting the playback of the DAW session. dear VR SPATIAL CONNECT will then record all object position automations in real-time until you stop the recording process. Next, you will need to execute a multitrack-bounce while having bypassed all instances of dearVR PRO. To have the automation curves synced with your audio, be sure that all bounced tracks start at the same time as our automation record does!
2. Import your audio and the automation data in Unity
The interactive workstation environment exists within the game engine Unity. Unity is an all in one game engine, which is used for many games and VR/AR experiences. When using dearVR UNITY plugin in the game engine you can access the same high-precision localization as that from the dearVR PRO and dearVR MUSIC plugins.
Begin by creating a Unity project and import the dearVR UNITY asset to be able to spatialize all sound sources using the dearVR audio engine. Next, we import all audio tracks and their automation files. It is suggested you start with the audio files as both audio clips and automations will automatically be linked in the created Unity prefabs. It is also recommended you use the dearVR reverb component in Unity and select the correct room preset. Now, drag the Unity prefab of each audio object into your scene and you’re ready to go!
More information about setting up a Unity scene with dearVR UNITY or working with the Unity reverb plugin can be found at dearVR’s dearVR UNITY manual.
If an audio middleware like FMOD or Wwise is integrated with your workflow you are able to attach to the created track automation clips to the connected Unity game objects and could even make use of FMODS’ Reaper Integration and Wwises Nuendo integration.
As you have learned, there are multitudes of use-cases and applications that benefit from having the ability to move around an audio object in a virtual environment with high-precision localization. Now that you know how you can transfer your object based 3D mix from your DAW into the virtual environment using dearVR SPATIAL CONNECT with dearVR PRO and dearVR UNITY support the DEAR REALITY team by implementing the Interactive Bundle into your workflow.
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