4 ms·
What bothers me the most about video conferencing software is when people talk over each other and you can only hear one of them properly. This is not a proble
by stunt 4y ago
What bothers me the most about video conferencing software is when people talk over each other and you can only hear one of them properly.
This is not a problem in multiplayer video games with voice chat because I think they somehow manage it with multiple simultaneous audio sources. I'm surprised that Zoom has not done that yet. Just do what video games do.
- ludwigvan 4y agoI believe Zoom has that. You need to enable original audio. https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/articles/115003279466-Using-and-preserving-original-sound-in-a-meeting https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/articles/115003279466-Using... I think the catch is that people need to be on headphones for echo prevention, which might be the case for most of the gamers.
- hoosieree 4y agoI hadn't even thought to tinker with this, because the auto-volume stuff is not that annoying... but now that I know it's there I'll try it out, so thanks for posting this!
- digitallyfree 4y agoThe reason for this is because the conferencing system typically has an automixer setup which turns up the active speaker and turns down everyone else. That's why it's impossible to say have a group of people sing a song together on Zoom (ignoring latency) because the automixer will switch between different singers erattically as opposed to hearing them all at the same time. In typical videoconference setting with one person speaking at a time this feature typically makes sense. This kind of mixing won't work well in a game for obvious reasons, so the audio is sent direct. However, the game uses direction and distance based audio to make the sound more natural. E.g. if the player to your right speaks, the signal you hear will be panned to the right. Humans are great at identifying different voices coming from different directions - you can try this yourself by loading up some voices into a DAW and seeing the difference in intelligibility having them panned out vs mono. Note that this tech may work well in a VR meeting room or something but it won't in a regular monural video call. Also the user will need a proper stereo setup (headphones or speakers a reasonable distance apart) for this to work.
- aeternum 4y agoI think a huge improvement to zoom and other conferencing systems would be to place the other call participants in virtual 3d circle around each person. The human auditory system is great at reconstructing directional audio even just from a stereo source. You don't need a VR meeting room to simulate the same idea, it'd make the call so much realistic and easy to follow.
- nivenkos 4y agoAnd forcing people to use headphones would make it a lot easier too.
- perryizgr8 4y agoA problem is that many wireless headphones nowadays have horrible mics. I can immediately tell which person is using an airpod in a meeting. They always sound low in volume and quality, and have difficulty in hearing what I'm saying.
- denkmoon 4y ago> E.g. if the player to your right speaks, the signal you hear will be panned to the right FYI that is fairly atypical. Mostly in mil-sim type games like ARMA, or VR games. Most in game voip is just a mono source played through both stereo channels equally.
- gabereiser 4y agoYes however, this can be configured and for the real-simmer’s out there, it’s a must. DCS SimpleRadio has two split audio channels for two radio frequencies. Arma 3 has tac radio that does this too. By default it’s setup like a game. Audio in both channels. It can be (and often is) extended.
- BeFlatXIII 4y agoOne other automixer problem: they are tuned for overly-sensitive laptop condenser mics with an assumption of massive fan noise. My dynamic mic with a hardware mute switch causes me all kinds of weird gain problems when I use the mute switch instead of the software muting.