High Fidelity Support for Ambisonic Soundfields

High Fidelity recently added support for Ambisonic audio.

Read on to learn how you can easily add Ambisonic audio to your High Fidelity environment.

Ambisonic is a surround sound solution originally developed to separate out the location of audio sources from the placement of speakers, essentially defining a sphere of possible source points around the listener from which audio will appear to be played.

While this level of abstraction was not immediately useful when Ambisonic was first developed, the format has seen renewed interest with the growth of 360 video and VR applications, where the source points for audio are already virtualized.

For VR applications, Ambisonic allows the editor/creator to essentially place audio sources at the edges of a VR scene. This means that an ambient audio “soundfield” can be aligned with the visual cues present in a 360 photosphere or the skybox used in an interactive VR environment.

Spatialized audio makes a huge difference to the sense of presence in VR. Ambisonic audio is particularly useful because a single file can be used to enhance an entire VR location with ambient sound.

Ambisonic content is now available on the High Fidelity Marketplace. You can download existing audio files and add them to existing High Fidelity domains.

Adding Ambisonic soundfields to your domain is easy: check out this video explaining how it works:

We’ve also put together a longer video introduction to Ambisonic if you’re interested to learn more. Hearing is believing, so be sure to get the latest High Fidelity beta and try it for yourself.