Immersive audio specialist Dear Reality has announced its Spatial Connect for Wwise project, designed to enable game audio designers to work fully immersed in interactive VR and AR audio productions.
This in-game, in-headset mixing workflow was developed in collaboration with game studios and with technical support from Audiokinetic, manufacturer of the Wwise audio middleware. The developers claim that Spatial Connect for Wwise will ‘massively improve the workflow for next-generation XR productions, providing a revolutionary in-headset control of Wwise sessions’.
The audio production workflow for VR and AR games or XR experiences presently requires audio designers to switch between previewing their work with a VR headset and making changes on a desktop PC. With Spatial Connect for Wwise, game audio engineers can mix directly in the headset, reducing context switching and enabling them to work intuitively on spatial audio in the immersive environment itself. The project is technically supported by Audiokinetic, who added features in Wwise audio middleware to support the new workflow.
‘Dear Reality’s Spatial Connect for Wwise is a game changer when mixing immersive audio for XR projects,’ says Dear Reality CEO and co-founder, Christian Sander. ‘Eliminating the tiresome and time-consuming switching between the in-headset review of the VR experience and the Wwise editing process on a desktop screen is a dream come true for game audio designers.’
Dear Reality started with a comprehensive analysis of existing production workflows and selected the steps that were to be transferred to the virtual space. Here, gesture-controlled audio mixing offers an enhanced perception of the scene and enables game audio designers to handle the 3D space more intuitively by working in context. Audio designers can control levels, attenuation curves as well as maximum distances and are immediately able to perceive the final user experience and spatial mix.
Spatial Connect for Wwise also allows game audio engineers to spot hard-to-find problematic sounds and understand the spatial audio session in the game by visualising the location of active sound events directly in the VR headset and providing the means to intuitively modify the most critical audio parameters.
‘We are very excited about the Spatial Connect for Wwise project and will soon be sharing more updates on the project,’ Sander says. ‘We also welcome new collaborations within the gaming and XR industries.’
More: www.dear-reality.com
