Audio plays an important part in the technology and especially in Virtual Reality. The sound has to be very realistic so as to offer an immersive arena to the Virtual Reality user. Keeping this thing in mind, Valve recently launched Steam Audio SDK Beta that will work as a spatial audio plug-in, which is designed specifically to enhance the interactive products and VR applications in particular. Recently launched Steam Audio SDK Beta by Valve does support Unity and Unreal Engine.
It is a fact that the Basic stereo output works perfectly fine with gaming on monitors and also with an immersive first person view that shows a picture of an abstracted world. Our brain has certain expectations on how the world around us sounds and should sound and for that our brain makes use of the audio cues in order to understand the spatial information. VR audio is a problem that hasn’t been cured yet, but the available solutions are making a huge difference. And now the developers wanted to inculcate spatial audio to their Virtual Reality applications and other content. The company has made the device compatible with Windows, Linux, Mac OS and Android. There is a continuous work of Impulsonic that is powering Steam Audio SDK.
Steam Audio is believed to be an advanced spatial audio solution provider that uses physics- based sound propagation which is in additional to the HRTF- based bin-aural audio for the increased and enhanced immersion. Realistic physics- based sound calculations are restrictive computationally and simplifying the underlying physics with 3D geometry, still wasn’t able to provide the perfect spatial audio. With the rise of the Virtual Reality Technology, Companies like NVIDIA have also jumped into the pool to find a solution or a cure to the problem.
