Roman Zhu showcased a future immersive sim audio system designed to enhance the player's spatial awareness.
In this video, Game Developer Roman Zhu demonstrated a custom fully dynamic ray-traced audio system to get better spatial awareness for the player set up with Unity for a future game project.
As he explained, there are no volumes for modifying audio in the level, it works by sensing the world near the player and audio sources. There are three major components right now: sound direction, low pass, and reverb, and currently, there's no differentiation between surface materials for sound transmission through surfaces.
In this context, ray tracing is casting rays from somewhere to somewhere else and it also supports bouncing from surfaces. What it tries to achieve is to simulate the path of sound waves through space from the source to the listener and check if the transmission is even possible.
"Currently, it's all on the background thread on the CPU. The algorithm itself is very easy, but doing it naively would be too expensive, so I added a lot of optimizations to not cast rays when it's not needed and limit the number of casted rays based on some source importance for this listener", commented the developer.
You know what this system was meant for:
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