Comments on: Audio Design for VR – Ustwo’s Land’s End

By: James

James — Thu, 05 Jan 2017 17:31:42 +0000

Fantastic article! I really enjoyed attention and immersion of the sound in Land’s End. As someone who’s aspiring to become a sound designer in VR, do you have any recommendations for how to learn the ropes and eventually get hired?

By: Sound Design For Virtual Reality Gaming - ADSR

Sound Design For Virtual Reality Gaming - ADSR — Tue, 08 Mar 2016 04:54:45 +0000

[…] reality (VR) continues to build momentum, the sound design is still a subject of discussion. In an article from designingsound.org, we take a peek into the sound work for new VR game, Lands […]

By: Todd

Todd — Wed, 02 Mar 2016 15:55:04 +0000

In reply to Varun.

Thanks Varun! Yeah, agreed re: the blend between stereo and HRTF. That’s definitely the way we would have gone had the memory leak / switch to Unity5 been sorted. For example, just adding the HRTF to one of the sources in the a quad array worked great. LE also had hardly any positional one-shot sounds, which is where I would imagine the filter working well.

Would be interested to know what you think about the idea of being able to tweak or scale the effect to be more subtle – or even offer an alternative hybrid / more subtle mode (per source) that could work better with static / multiple point sources.

By: Varun

Varun — Tue, 01 Mar 2016 08:56:15 +0000

Thanks for sharing Todd!

Ambient sounds are not the easiest to pull off well with HRTFs as the sounds are treated as point sources. Most people we’ve worked with end up creating a blend between stereo and HRTF to get a good mix of diffuse sound (and spread) while also getting a bit of the point source positional effect. On the other hand, we’ve found that b-format ambience works very very well in-game.

It is a shame that Unity’s memory leak for audio plugins could not be fixed in time!