Post by account_disabled on Dec 27, 2017 9:20:47 GMT -5
Hi,
Lots of my fellow game audio professionals are often asking me the question about the difference working with Virtual Reality compared to flat-screen games except for Binaural positioning. Well, my short answer is that to create an alternate reality that provides a natural listening experience in (gaming) Virtual Environments, our game audio creative approach needs to be adapted, and binaural positioning plays a major role into revisiting it. The long answer is below…
Multi-Sensory Integration:
With the lack of full-sensory usage in Virtual Reality games (only Vision, Hearing, and Touch through haptics are integrated), the human brain has the power to adapt the focus or the perception of the senses that are integrated. Don’t get me wrong, you won’t become a super-hero with sharpen sense(s) by playing VR games, but the brain can rewire itself through training and learning, to enhance the use of integrated senses, with the goal to use information at its disposal to analyze and interact with the surroundings.
Your smell and taste are not turned off while playing VR games, so those two senses are providing contradictory information between what you see and hear from the game versus what you smell and possibly taste from your physical surrounding environment. Touch (and proprioceptors – sensory receptor which receives stimuli from within the body, especially one that responds to position and movement) would send mixed information between the virtual world and the real world.
The senses that are used need to be reproduced respectfully to immerse the player mentally in the virtual world, combining well-designed and controlled simultaneous visual, auditory, and haptic cues to create a believable Virtual Reality experience. The brain allows to react when subtle sensory signals that might not seems important on their own gets trigger simultaneously, and that’s the power of multisensory integration (MSI).
“A basic tenet of multisensory integration is the ability of one sensory modality to enhance or to suppress information from another sensory modality.” (Calvert et al., 2004)
A good example would be the “Virtual barber shop” demo released about 10 years ago on Youtube.
Most people experiencing this binaural audio demo for the first time, if mentally immersed (close your eyes while listening to not be distracted by your surroundings, and take a seat), would feel someone is literally behind them touching their scalp, talking to them, and cutting their hairs.
For More Reference: Creative Medical Animation
Lots of my fellow game audio professionals are often asking me the question about the difference working with Virtual Reality compared to flat-screen games except for Binaural positioning. Well, my short answer is that to create an alternate reality that provides a natural listening experience in (gaming) Virtual Environments, our game audio creative approach needs to be adapted, and binaural positioning plays a major role into revisiting it. The long answer is below…
Multi-Sensory Integration:
With the lack of full-sensory usage in Virtual Reality games (only Vision, Hearing, and Touch through haptics are integrated), the human brain has the power to adapt the focus or the perception of the senses that are integrated. Don’t get me wrong, you won’t become a super-hero with sharpen sense(s) by playing VR games, but the brain can rewire itself through training and learning, to enhance the use of integrated senses, with the goal to use information at its disposal to analyze and interact with the surroundings.
Your smell and taste are not turned off while playing VR games, so those two senses are providing contradictory information between what you see and hear from the game versus what you smell and possibly taste from your physical surrounding environment. Touch (and proprioceptors – sensory receptor which receives stimuli from within the body, especially one that responds to position and movement) would send mixed information between the virtual world and the real world.
The senses that are used need to be reproduced respectfully to immerse the player mentally in the virtual world, combining well-designed and controlled simultaneous visual, auditory, and haptic cues to create a believable Virtual Reality experience. The brain allows to react when subtle sensory signals that might not seems important on their own gets trigger simultaneously, and that’s the power of multisensory integration (MSI).
“A basic tenet of multisensory integration is the ability of one sensory modality to enhance or to suppress information from another sensory modality.” (Calvert et al., 2004)
A good example would be the “Virtual barber shop” demo released about 10 years ago on Youtube.
Most people experiencing this binaural audio demo for the first time, if mentally immersed (close your eyes while listening to not be distracted by your surroundings, and take a seat), would feel someone is literally behind them touching their scalp, talking to them, and cutting their hairs.
For More Reference: Creative Medical Animation