OSSIC with VR

Demo 1: VR with the Vive

First up is the Vive. I put on the headset and have the headphones (generics) slipped onto my head. This is to showcase the algos which OSSIC have come up with for 3D positional audio and plugged into a game engine with object location tracking on audio. I’m in some kind of wizards’ lab and there is clutter all over the place. Something seems odd and I’m trying to figure out what I should be clicking or waving the control at etc and spinning and looking around as I get auditory clues to what’s going on all the time.

Then it hits me. There is sound everywhere.

Let me just say that again. Because it’s important.

There is sound.

EVERYWHERE

It’s an assault on the ears. I’m not just talking about front, back, left and right, but up and down too.

All of a sudden, I realise what was odd, it took me a minute to register, because usually when I put on headphones for gaming, after all these years, I suspect like most people, we make some kind of automatic mental adjustment to not expect “real” sound like you get, you know, in real life.

But here, it’s real. And it’s weird. But in all the VR demos I’ve done over the years, this is the first time I can genuinely pick out where something is coming from properly. I was at EGX Rezzed last week (check out my VR report here) and one of the demos I tried was TheBlu, where you’re on an underwater wreck and the blue whale comes out of nowhere to stop next to you. Well what I didn’t say in that article was that when the whale first appeared, I wasn’t looking in the direction it came from, I was facing completely the opposite horizontal direction so if it was real life, I would have heard it coming from behind and above me. As it happened, I couldn’t tell where it was coming from and just spun wildly around looking for something I heard but couldn’t see and didn’t know where the sound came from.

None of that happens here. I can place (to within maybe a couple of feet) where EVERYTHING is. I don’t know how else to describe it. It’s amazing, and that’s for 2 reasons.

1. It’s the first time I’ve experienced anything approaching to a genuine 5.1 or 7.1 soundscape from something on my head.
2. It’s the first time I’ve experienced 3D positional audio from something on my head.

Most gaming headphones are aimed at doing the best job they can of making 5.1 or 7.1, whether that’s from virtual surround or multi-driver surround. This fully achieves that.

And then goes further by giving you the vertical axis. I’m sorry but I just don’t have the words to describe how truly blown away by this I am.

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