Dolby Atmos technology enables Dolby.io Spatial Audio, an award-winning communications API, to deliver more natural-sounding virtual conversations — unlocking new use cases around immersive online social interaction between groups of people and live events.
If you have spent any meaningful amount of time engaged in virtual communication, you are likely all too familiar with what a poor experience sounds like. You cannot identify who is talking or locate where they are on your screen, and in many cases, you cannot hear people clearly enough to understand what they are saying. This makes the entire experience feel disconnected, and it’s easy to make the argument audio is one of the most important parts of any online interaction between two or more people.
Unfortunately, virtual communications have been limited in audio quality and realism – an impedance to the growth of virtual experiences in both the business and entertainment arenas. The challenges multiply as additional speakers are introduced.
Let’s take, for example, a virtual world use case. Many communications solutions let you hear a few people around you, while culling out all other voices, in order to balance bandwidth and client-side resources like CPU and RAM. This results in online events that always sound like the audience is not engaged. In contrast, Dolby.io uses “Spatial Mixing” to enable you to hear hundreds of people around you, and can replicate the experience of hearing the energy of the crowd cheering when something exciting happens. We also provide audio processing to enhance the quality of voice and music that helps keep the sense of immersion in the virtual world.
Dolby.io Spatial Audio powered by Dolby Atmos technology
Dolby continues to democratize resources for creatives to deliver immersive experiences for consumers while Dolby.io extends decades of Dolby media and technology innovation to new audiences through enabling developers to create immersive virtual scenes and manipulate the three-dimensional sonic spatial position of participants’ speech at will.
Dolby.io is bringing Dolby Atmos technology to virtual communication experiences through the Dolby.io developer platform. Through Dolby Atmos powered APIs and developer tools, Dolby.io is empowering developers to deliver awe-inspiring experiences in virtual contexts, including life-like dialogue in social interaction, increased immersion in music events, and captivating communications in gaming.
“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 the Dolby.io’s SDK was also more user-friendly to integrate.”
Maxime Long, Co-founder and CTO at Odyssey
Unlocking improved communication in virtual worlds
Today, Dolby.io announced new Virtual Worlds beta plugins for Unity 3D and Unreal Engine, powered by Dolby Atmos technology, to build immersive virtual worlds that redefine social interaction and captivate audiences around the globe.
For end users who participate in virtual communications, spatial audio promises unparalleled social connectivity. Dolby.io’s industry-leading spatial audio and voice processing technologies remove unwanted background noises, balance microphone levels, cancel echoes to capture exactly what users say, and enable precise sound positioning in the virtual environment — leading to increased immersion and intelligibility. The importance of these capabilities is further reinforced as the complexity of the environment grows.
As virtual experiences continue to grow in both popularity and sophistication, with examples including not only gaming but virtual concerts and watch parties, the importance of premium quality social interactions grows. Dolby Atmos has reinvented how entertainment is created and experienced, allowing creatives everywhere to place each sound exactly where they want it to go, for a more realistic and immersive audio experience. And now developers can leverage Dolby.io Spatial Audio powered by Dolby Atmos to bring immersion and social connectivity into their own applications and services.
Learn more and get started
To learn more about improving social interactions for more immersive experiences in virtual worlds, visit our solution page here.
If you are a developer interested in improving the audio in your virtual world, join the open beta program for the Unreal and Unity plugins by following the links below.
Plugin Documentation
