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This is one of those genius ideas that are "obvious in retrospect" and you think "how come nobody thought of this before". I bet spatialization of audio could m

by m0zg 6y ago

This is one of those genius ideas that are "obvious in retrospect" and you think "how come nobody thought of this before". I bet spatialization of audio could massively improve intelligibility of video conferences with more than 2 participants. In retrospect it seems nuts that we're not really using stereo imaging. All the tech for spatial audio has been available for about three decades now, and much of it is out of patent already. Newer stuff even takes the position of your head into account for added realism. I hope Google/Microsoft/Zoom pay attention to this as well. And also Logitech, Bose, etc, so that we see headphones with accelerometers and gyros built in.

moron4hire 6y ago
This is one of those ideas that just found its time. I was by no means the first to make a spatialized audio chat system. I might have been very close to the first to release something after the start of the pandemic, but it's also not even the first time I've built spatialized audio chat into a system. My first experience with spatialized audio in a chat system was AltspaceVR, when I first got into working in the VR space, when they interviewed me for a job (sadly, they didn't understand their own product enough and insisted that I'd have to move coasts to work with them). That was easily 6 years ago. A couple of years later, I built my own VR-based spatialized chat system. It was way too early. WebVR was way too much friction for users[0]. Incidentally, Calla has all the necessary parts to be usable in a VR system. And I'm using it for that in my day job (VR environments for roleplay scenarios in learning foreign languages). I don't remember why exactly I open sourced this project. It just seemed like the thing to do. I guess I hoped that other developers would find it useful and contribute bug fixes. That largely hasn't happened, so I'm mostly just focused on building the day job project for now. Once I get the next milestone done, I'll consider working on more features for Calla, but for now I need to pay the bills. [0] WebXR today still kind of is, but it's a lot better than it used to be and I think some clever design in UX with something akin to 2-factor auth can help get around it.

by m0zg 6y ago

moron4hire 6y ago

This is one of those ideas that just found its time. I was by no means the first to make a spatialized audio chat system. I might have been very close to the first to release something after the start of the pandemic, but it's also not even the first time I've built spatialized audio chat into a system. My first experience with spatialized audio in a chat system was AltspaceVR, when I first got into working in the VR space, when they interviewed me for a job (sadly, they didn't understand their own product enough and insisted that I'd have to move coasts to work with them). That was easily 6 years ago. A couple of years later, I built my own VR-based spatialized chat system. It was way too early. WebVR was way too much friction for users[0]. Incidentally, Calla has all the necessary parts to be usable in a VR system. And I'm using it for that in my day job (VR environments for roleplay scenarios in learning foreign languages). I don't remember why exactly I open sourced this project. It just seemed like the thing to do. I guess I hoped that other developers would find it useful and contribute bug fixes. That largely hasn't happened, so I'm mostly just focused on building the day job project for now. Once I get the next milestone done, I'll consider working on more features for Calla, but for now I need to pay the bills. [0] WebXR today still kind of is, but it's a lot better than it used to be and I think some clever design in UX with something akin to 2-factor auth can help get around it.