AMD launches TrueAudio Next for realistic VR audio experiences

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With the continuous visual scenes provided by an HMD, audio needs greater realism.

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Reminds me of the original operation flashpoint, I assume they carried over their audio processing to Arma. Sound would travel at the correct speed, so a far off explosion would be seen before it was heard. Even a sniper shot with a hill close by would echo correctly so you didn't know where the original shot came from.

EAX was pretty cool, but not as advanced as this. It was my main advantage in CS, using EAX and surround speakers where most people used headphones. Still firmly stick with speakers as a result.

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Originally Posted by Dashers

EAX was pretty cool, but not as advanced as this. It was my main advantage in CS, using EAX and surround speakers where most people used headphones. Still firmly stick with speakers as a result.

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You only have two ears; provided the audio processing is done correctly you can get all the surround effect you need with stereo headphones. Your hearing judges location based on sound phase and volume which can be calculated by audio processors.

Not that lots of games actually do that proper stereo processing of course...

That's not quite true, whilst you only have two ears, unlike eyes, they don't receive on a 2D plane. Your ear can detect noise through your head very easily and the direction is significant.

Whilst virtual surround is often very good, it's simply no match for directional audio.

Lets see if this actually gets used in more games! ;)

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Originally Posted by Dashers

That's not quite true, whilst you only have two ears, unlike eyes, they don't receive on a 2D plane. Your ear can detect noise through your head very easily and the direction is significant.

Whilst virtual surround is often very good, it's simply no match for directional audio.

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That's irrelevant, the sound still arrives at one of two ear drums and hence things like distortion caused by transmission through bone can calculated through signal processing (though I imagine the difference is negligible at best). There are countless demos proving you can get full directional sound from a stereo headset. You also don't have to deal with things like speakers not being aligned as the studio intended, or sound reflections from walls or objects in the room.

However like I said, the main issue is many games just not doing this, which is why lots of sound cards/headphones allow you to feed them a 5.1/7.1 input and they do the binaural processing instead, usually to good effect.

A similar concept is used in radio beamforming - having two antennas driven through some signal processing allows it to effectively increase the gain in a given direction whilst destructively cancelling it elsewhere.