Chapter 7. Hearing and Believing with 3D Audio
Experiencing something is so much more than seeing it. We've been focusing on visual elements of VR, but for a truly immersive experience, we need to engage as many of the player's senses as we can, and this applies particularly to hearing.
A lot of the information we process based on our hearing is subconscious; for instance, if sound waves hit the back of our ears, what we hear is muffled by their conical shape. This muffling tells our brain that the sound is originating from behind us. If the sound waves bounce off our shoulders before entering our ears, that tells our brain that the sound is above us.
In typical screen-based games, this level of audio realism isn't possible, because the lack of head tracking makes our ears stay in the same static spot. However, with HMDs like the Oculus Rift, we can calculate the relative position and rotation of each ear, meaning the potential granularity of a realistic audio system...