Spatial Communications at Scale in Virtual Environments – Paul Boustead
Talking with a group of friends face-to-face can be very engaging, with fast-paced turn-taking and overlapping conversations. You can even have such a conversation in a noisy restaurant in the presence of background voices and noises. However, talking with a group of friends online is much more stilted; if people talk over the top of each other, it quickly becomes unintelligible – it is a much less engaging experience. We will present Dolby’s experience building large-scale spatial voice communications services for virtual environments for millions of users. We will introduce psychoacoustic literature that talks about how spatial improves voice intelligibility. We then discuss our experiences replicating crowded communication scenes in a virtual world while maintaining intelligibility.