If your product or service has the word “3-D” in it, odds are it’s got a much greater chance of being hot than not. Movies, handheld game systems, television screens, and other video formats have been blessed by the proliferation of 3-D technologies, but few people would think of audio as a beneficiary of 3-D-ness.
However, Vivox has been one of those companies that has been working on 3-D audio for years, included in EVE Online and Second Life, among other familiar staples in the online gaming world. Now it’s quietly rolled out 3-D audio in Sony’s superhero-driven massively multiplayer online role-playing game DC Universe Online on both the PC and PlayStation 3, a first for Sony’s console. Vivox, a Boston area-located company, specializes in VoIP positional audio used in Internet-based services and products.
As the Vivox technology is applied to the DCUO game, characters might be talking on voice chat to the left or right, for example, and the characters will be located to the left or right, respectively, and with volume to match the distance between the positions of the characters engaged in dialogue.
If positional audio is disconcerting to a player, he or she can turn the feature off, but Sony Online Entertainment CEO John Smedley feels players will see the benefit in exploring positional audio.
“It gives the players the ability to easily converse,” he says. “What separates a massively multiplayer game from normal games is a lot of people can interact together. On a console that is hard to do because there is no keyboard. This lets a lot of people talk at once, and they can talk just they were in a crowded room. It’s really the most efficient way to communicate.”
[Source: USA Today]
