With the recent surge of "7.1" gaming headsets wit

An old example of this is the virtual barbershop.


Not the best example but gets the point across.

It's extremely immersive, almost lifelike. When the barber takes the scissors out the back of my neck was tingling. Compared to virtual 7.1 headphones or even actual 5.1 headphones, it's miles beyond. There is no competition.

Just imagine, an FPS where you can actually hear bullets flying right next to you and the sound of your squad mates shooting at your side, the sound of a grenade whistling over you head?

Or a horror game. God damn I would pay good money for an atmospheric horror game with real 3D audio. Playing Slender while you can hear his footsteps on the grass behind you? Playing Amnesia while you can hear the breath of the monster behind the curtains as you can hear you own muffled breath as you try to hide in a closet?

Why isn't this a thing? Surely it's not just because it would more expensive?

A company called Sensaura had this technology in the 90's. We had fully positional 3d surround in games for 1998 until 2003 with technology based on binaural algorithms.

The first Unreal game is a good example of how good it was, far better than what we have now. The problem was it was too good, the pc sound heavy weight "Creative" offered the owners lots and lots of money bought the company and for some stupid reason shelved the technology and used the patents to stop other companies bringing anything like it market and nether included it in any of their products.

Here's the history:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensaura

http://www.rage3d.com/board/showthread.php?t=33729198

http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2001/nov/01/highereducation.research

>A3D sounds best on headphones (play the videos labeled “headphone version”, make sure you have your left/right ear pieces on the correct way). When listening to the speaker versions, there’s a listening sweet spot – your two speakers should be facing you and be the same distance away from you. You’re in the sweet spot when some of the sounds feel like they are right next to you instead of coming from the speakers.

>The first are two videos of an A3D video game reel. You should hear lots of sounds moving and Doppler shifting all around you. See if you recognize any of the games (hundreds of video games used A3D in the mid 90s).

https://toni.org/a3d/

>>56280967
>why aren't we seeing any games with binaural audio?
Because it's not that simple. Sound is not as simple as one likes to think, it's not just telling your ears where a sound comes from, it's also simulating all kinds of reflections, your very own head and ears etc. All efforts I heard in that directions are rather poor, and the better they get, the more apparent it gets what the problems are. It just never feels quite real.

On the other hand, who gives a fuck about muh games anyway.

>>56280967


If sound was that big of a deal to people they wouldn't be buying meme "7.1 gaming headsets" and would spend that money on some real headphones instead

Marketing buzzwords that people like the sound of isn't it

Isn't this already a thing? With my G933s I can easily tell which direction sounds are coming from in most games.

>>56280967
It's called stereo sound, we've had it since the Gameboy.

>>56281336
Quiet

>>56281336
There's a distinct difference between plain two-channel audio and positional audio that takes ear separation and head shadowing into account.

Sound arrives at your ears at different times. That difference changes depending on the orientation of the sound to your head. For instance, if one ear is directly towards the sound, while the other is facing away from the sound. Both ears will hear it, but one earlier than the other. The difference is noticeable enough for you to be able to unconsciously locate that sound.

The shape of your ears also helps to give you cues about whether a sound is ahead of you or behind you. Software that can emulate these effects can add much more dimension to an audio experience.

>>56280967
>why aren't we seeing any games with binaural audio?
Windows Vista revamped audio subsystem killed all the old sound processing that was present in early-mid 2000's games, rendering their advanced sound capabilities useless
AAA game companies noticed the userbase gave zero fucks and didn't spend anything in fixing their audio, and just left the most basic sound mixing in them
OpenAL recovered most of the work of those early systems, and improved on them, but almost no one uses it
welp, you already wrote about it in >>56280977 >>56280995 >>56281004
The main problem with binaural audio it's that the hrtf varies from person to person, and your average fuck won't bother setting it up since he's stupid as fuck
>>56281105
>Because it's not that simple. Sound is not as simple as one likes to think, it's not just telling your ears where a sound comes from, it's also simulating all kinds of reflections, your very own head and ears etc. All efforts I heard in that directions are rather poor, and the better they get, the more apparent it gets what the problems are. It just never feels quite real.
Most of those problems were solved years ago

OP, if you want to experience it in a game Minecraft is able to use OpenAL as an audio renderer, and actually outputs real positional data to it so you actually get hrtf in it, there's some reddit guide out there

>>56281004
Woooah. After I listened to these 3D sound demos I remembered how the sound was really immersive in so many old games I used to play back in the early 2000s.

I never really noticed a shift in how sound design stopped doing that and went to simpler stereo audio, but when you listen to the demos side-by-side you really get the difference.

Shouldn't it be comparatively easy to leave in this technology in newer games? Engine developers should be able to just set it as default so that game game devs don't need to do anything explicit.

Or is the process programmatically a lot more difficult than that?

>>56284558
Creative became a monopoly in 3D audio with EAX and their X-Fi's.

Then Microsoft killed hardware accelerated audio in Vista, which also killed Creative's monopoly, but caused game developers to go back to simpler audio models that relied only on the CPU.