Making it easier for developers to create spatialized sound with FMOD and Wwise

Recreating spatialized sound the way humans actually hear it can greatly improve the sense the immersion in any game or app experience. But for developers, battling with various unconnected spatial audio tools can be both confusing and time-consuming. We’ve worked closely with Firelight Technologies and Audiokinetic, creators of the popular audio engines FMOD and Wwise, on a suite of streamlined spatial audio plugins that make it possible to add high-quality, spatialized audio into your apps across desktop, mobile, and VR platforms—including Android, iOS, Windows, OSX and Linux.

The new Google VR FMOD and Wwise plugin suite provides all the features developers need to create highly immersive spatial audio experiences:

• Highly accurate rendering of large numbers of spatialized sound sources.

• Distance, elevation and occlusion effects, all at minimal overhead.

• Room acoustics that react in real-time to the listener’s location, smoothly transitioning between different environments.

• Playback of immersive ambisonic sound fields, using the same technology that powers spatial audio on YouTube.

These plugins work seamlessly with the FMOD and Wwise integrations into Unity and Unreal Engine. The Unity integration provides an intuitive way to control room acoustics that react instantly to changes in your app or game environments. Changes to room sizes, material types and object positions are all reflected in real time through the Google VR spatialization engine to produce lifelike sound.

Up until today, our spatialization algorithms were primarily optimized for smartphones to have minimal impact on the primary CPU, where mobile apps do most of their work. Now running on desktop PCs, the new FMOD and Wwise spatial audio plugins offer faster performance, spatializing greater numbers of high-quality sound sources, while continuing to minimize impact to your CPU budget.