There's been a big focus on video in developing VR, and it's definitely gotten better, but I think audio is too often overlooked. It's a potentially even harder

There's been a big focus on video in developing VR, and it's definitely gotten better, but I think audio is too often overlooked. It's a potentially even harder problem than video. Audio has fallen victim to voice-specific compression and noise-gating in almost every talk-over-the-internet app. Music performances don't translate, for example. Audio nuance doesn't translate. But there's a further problem: how to you put everyone into the same acoustic space? Currently, all participants come from disjoint acoustic spaces. One person is in a large room with wood floors, another in a small, carpeted room. How do you strip out the sound of those rooms, and add artificial ambience as if everyone were gathered in the same room, or no room at all (outside)? People may not think of these things, but they profoundly affect our sense of "being there" in subconscious ways. I think we're still pretty impressed that we can send video and audio over the internet. We need to get over that, and realize we still have a long way to go.