We’re excited to announce Dolby.io has won a 2022 DEVIES Award in the VR/AR/MR/3D category for our Communications SDK with Spatial Audio. A DEVIES Award represents industry recognition of the team’s work in developing the next generation of immersive communications experiences.
General Availability of Manual Spatial Audio
We’re also pleased to share that the manual spatial audio placement feature of the Dolby.io Communications API that has been in open beta is now generally available for building web, desktop and mobile android applications.
“I am really pleased with the API design the team created. It is easy to use and gives developers the flexibility to work the way they want to work.”
Gary Makin, Product Manager at Dolby
Spatial Audio with manual placement lets developers build products that enable more life-like experiences in real-time communications applications and AR/VR/MR environments. With Spatial Audio, developers can assign sound to a location in a three-dimensional space, making audio and video scenes sound natural and engaging. For example, if someone on the left side of your screen talks, the speaker’s voice will come from the left, and participants can better understand one another and interact more closely to how you would speak face-to-face with a group.
The Value of Spatial Audio
In the real-world we handle overlapping audio well. Our ears pick up the sum of all the sounds we’re hearing at any given time and our brain can pull those apart to concentrate and listen. Without spatial audio, online communications by comparison feels flat and this can result in distraction and fatigue. In order to improve intelligibility with spatial audio the Dolby.io communications platform can model how a sound at a particular location would be perceived when it hits your ear canal. When wearing headphones this binaural effect creates a much more immersive experience.
We’ve learned lots from the enthusiasm and creativity of early adopters that shared their stories with us.
“Spatial audio is a differentiating capability for our platform. After encountering a few roadblocks in our development with various spatial audio providers, we decided to make the switch to Dolby.io. With Dolby.io, we not only achieved a better level of spatial audio fidelity, but Dolby.io‘s SDK was also more user-friendly to integrate.”
Maxime Long, Co-founder and CTO at Odyssey
When you spend all day jumping from video conference to video conference you appreciate the quality difference this makes. When you can feel more comfortable for longer periods of time it is a better experience and users remain engaged.
The DEVIES Award for Dolby.io
The 10th annual DEVIES Awards are the definitive annual awards competition recognizing outstanding design, engineering, and innovation in developer technology.
“Developer tools and technology product solutions continue to lead the way for developers & engineers to build upon the backbone of the multi-trillion-dollar market for today’s cloud-based SaaS software and hardware. Dolby Laboratories’s win is evidence of their leading role in the growth and innovation in the developer technology industry”
Jonathan Pasky, Executive Producer of DevNetwork, producer of DeveloperWeek and the 2022 DEVIES Awards.
Award winners were selected from hundreds of nominations by an expert-led panel of the DevNetwork Advisory Board, based on three criteria: 1) attracting notable attention and awareness in the software industry; 2) general regard and use by the developer, engineering & IT community; and 3) being a technical leader in its sector for innovation.
The DEVIES Award will be presented during DeveloperWeek 2022 (All-Virtual, Feb 7-9, 2022). Follow and reach out to us on social if you’d like to attend and we’ll share a free pass to join in for the celebration.
How-to Get Started with Manual Placement
Ready to jump in and get started building? Dolby.io provides a recurring free monthly credit that can be used to experience spatial for yourself while developing your application.
“There is a passion among the team at Dolby to provide a quality tool for developers to use. This quality has been a strong passion in all aspects of the development from how to best define the API or describe it in documentation so it is both easy to use but flexible to many use-cases, to the experience of what is heard through critical listening during many different test scenarios. Overall I am excited to see what other developers will use this for.”
Brendon Costa, Engineering Lead at Dolby
Helpful Resources for Building Apps with Spatial Audio
Here are some resources to get started.
- Sample code for web and mobile if you are just getting started with Dolby.io
- Enabling Spatial Audio in Your Web Application to add spatial audio to an existing app you already built with Dolby.io
- Migration guide with tips for updating your application from another provider
- Sign up for the next Dolby.io Developer Days workshop where a developer advocate can help you get started with your first API call
- Check out the release notes for v3.4.0 for more details about the manual spatial audio placement capabilities
