Google Cardboard adds support for spatial audio to SDK

Developers of Google Cardboard virtual reality apps will have a new tool available to help them create even more immersive environments for their users. Google Developers announced an update to the Cardboard SDK to add support for spatial audio or 3D sound. The updated SDK will be available for developers using Unity to support Android, iOS, Windows and OS X or those developing in Android itself via a Java API.

Google’s development team indicated they were trying to achieve two goals with this latest addition to the SDK. The first is to help developers incorporate sound into their apps in the same way that humans hear sounds. This meant doing some things like introducing a slight delay between left and right to simulate the differing time it takes for a sound to reach one side of a user’s head versus the other. Google also cuts out some higher frequency elements on the “far” ear to account for normal dampening that occurs due to the skull. Google also gives developers the ability to specify the size and material of a virtual environment, which changes the quality of sounds.

The second goal was to make sure the new spatial audio features would function properly on user’s hardware, meaning the computing workload needed to be minimized. Google says the SDK is optimized for mobile processors and computes audio in real-time in a separate thread that takes place outside of the primary processor. Developers will also have the ability to selectively control the importance of individual sound elements so that computing power can be directed to more critical items.

Google’s developers have created a sample app for Android to help developers get a better feel for the possibilities included in the new SDK and full documentation on how to implement spatial audio is now available.

source: Google Developers

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