Meta, the tech company behind Facebook’s virtual reality (VR) headsets, has announced a significant update to its XR Audio SDK, introducing Acoustic Ray Tracing. This feature simulates the realistic propagation of sound in a virtual environment, taking into account reflections, reverb, occlusion, obstruction, and diffraction.
Unlike its competitors, such as Valve’s Steam Audio, Meta claims that its Acoustic Ray Tracing is designed to run efficiently on mobile chipsets, like those used in Meta’s Quest headsets, even with complex virtual environments. This means that users can expect realistic audio even in intricate indoor environments, winding caves, or bustling cityscapes.
The Acoustic Ray Tracing technology works by allowing sound to bend around obstacles (diffraction), modeling how objects block sound (occlusion), and simulating how sound changes when it passes through different materials (obstruction). This results in a more immersive VR experience, as users can hear the echo of their opponents’ footsteps even when they are out of sight, allowing them to strategize and set up ambushes.
Developers can tag each virtual object with a specific sound material, such as metal, brick, carpet, glass, or wood, which significantly alters how it absorbs and reflects sound rays. Meta’s upcoming title, Batman: Arkham Shadow, developed by its acquired studio Camouflaj, will be the first major game to use this new Acoustic Ray Tracing technology.
In addition to this update, Meta is also upgrading the Head-Related Transfer Function (HRTF) model to improve spatial audio on Quest. This upgrade aims to make audio sources in apps sound more like they’re coming from the virtual object, providing a more immersive VR experience for Quest owners. With its leading HRTF spatialization quality and now the most performant audio propagation simulation, Meta hopes to attract VR developers back to its solution, resulting in more realistic audio in virtual worlds running on Quest headsets.
