< Back to IRCAM Forum

Binaural proximity effect

For VR uses, the binaural spatialization in SPAT is not very effective if there’s no proximity effect (for example, the way it’s done for game engines by Oculus Audio or Steam Audio). Is there a way of enabling this in SPAT? Moving an audio source away from the listener has a very good distance effect but moving very close to the listener has no effect beyond certain point and sources sound as if they are always at a fixed distance (1-2 meters?). If this is a system limitation I would not consider SPAT as appropriate for VR since often the user gets close to audio sources and this acoustic mismatch would break immersion.

Hi,

Tweaking the radius, and the source presence parameters of the source may help changing the distance perception…

N.

You may check additionnal infos about radius in the forum in the search bar.

Take care

N.

Thank you nadirb,

It does help. Not as dramatic as other systems that emulate proximity but it makes a big difference and makes it usable.

This is what I was referring to when mentioning Oculus Audio: https://developer.oculus.com/blog/near-field-3d-audio-explained/ During my tests I found It works quite well, to the point that I truly felt the audio source was quite close to my head.

3 Likes

Hi,

The spat5 overview does, with no doubt what it is aimed for.
Would it be possible to have a kind of search bar, we could enter key words in this so many folded library !
Thanks T.

Well I just typed nearfiled in the finder search bar and it pointed out directly to the spat5.pan~ maxhelp So I for one think that there’s no need for extra grep programming.

Take care,

N.

Hi T,

How about integrate that in the “dead zone” of panoramix (when distance is less than 1 m) ?

Best,

Jerome