How Immersive Sound Brings Mixed Reality to Life

Building believable virtual environments is about creating multi-sensory experiences, and spatial audio technology is bringing us a step closer to that.

It took me a second to pinpoint the strangely familiar noise coming from the corner of the room, but then I saw the red plush toy perched on top of a lamp, and realized the Angry Bird call was coming from it — except that it wasn’t.

I stood giggling in Ivan Tashev’s tiny office in Microsoft’s Redmond HQ, and as a cacophony of sounds came at me from various directions I quickly forgot I was wearing headphones, or that the room was entirely silent apart from my own exclamations as — a bit like Alice in Wonderland — the inanimate objects in the room all started talking to me.

The phone rang, there was a knock on the door, and the radio started playing some tunes. A wartime poster of a smiling soldier which read “How about a nice cup of shut the fuck up?” now offered me that same cup, and the words were so clearly coming from his lips that it felt uncanny that they weren’t actually moving.

The point of all this was to show off the spatial audio technology that Tashev and his team at the Audio and Acoustics Research Group developed for the…