3D Sound Labs Announces the Availability of Ambisonics Solution for 360° VR Player
3D Sound Labs, the 3D/VR Audio specialist, announces today the availability of the latest version of its VR Audio Kit, an Ambisonics SDK optimized for 360° mobile players. This technology has been jointly presented last month at IBC 2016 in Amsterdam together with solution provider for content delivery Viaccess Orca at IBC 2016 in Amsterdam: the demo of a 360° VR mobile video player with High-Order Ambisonics (HOA) audio, running on an Android smartphone, was playing a 4K, H264 compressed, 360° video along with a compressed 3rd order Ambisonics audio stream.
3D Sound Labs’ HOA audio decoder with binaural rendering is now available to be integrated into third-parties’ 360° players, providing scalability to adapt to the processing power available on the device it is decoded, as well as low latency head-tracking.
With CPU usage up to 50% lower than competing state-of-the-art spatial audio solutions, and lower sound coloration when compared with conventional virtual-speaker based solutions, 3D Sound Labs SDK brings an unprecedented audio quality to mobile VR environment where resources are limited.
“We believe Ambisonics will be the format of choice for Virtual Reality. Lower-order implementations are already popular on leading 360° video distribution platforms”, said Dimitri Singer, co-founder and CEO at 3D Sound Labs. “Our solution brings a more realistic, true-to-life audio experience while maintaining limited CPU resources consumption. Furthermore, our tests show that low bit-rate encoding can be achieved with High Order Ambisonics when used in conjunction with standard audio codecs to compress each channel independently.”
Of course, the 3D Sound Labs’ SDK allows for Sound Object rendering as well, where developers of computer generated VR scenes can create and spatialize virtual sound sources in 3D space.
The free-of-charge evaluation version of the VR Audio Kit can be downloaded at http://www.3dsoundlabs.com/category/developers/
About 3D Sound Labs
3D Sound Labs is a French VR Audio technology company founded in January 2014 by entrepreneur Dimitri Singer, consumer electronics specialist Xavier Bonjour and Centrale-Supelec research engineer Renaud Séguier. 3D Sound Labs develops 3D/VR Audio software technologies as well as hardware (3D Audio headphones and motion tracking modules) to enable immersive and realistic experience of spatial sound over headphones thanks to its HRTF-based Ambisonics binaural engine.
The company created the world’s first Smart 3D Audio Headphones and also provides a SDK and a freemium technology licensing program for third parties.
