Google Cardboard Gets 3D Audio

Google’s affordable VR headset was already pretty great, but now it will get even better thanks to the 3D audio that the tech giant will improve it with. According to a post on the Google Developers Blog from Wednesday, January 13,  the Cardboard SDKs for Unity and Android support spatial audio as of yesterday. Thanks to this improvement, the Google Cardboard will not only deliver great quality virtual reality images but will also awe users with an impressive immersive audio experience. In order to get this experience, users only need a pair of headsets, a smartphone and the Google Cardboard viewer.

Thanks to the SDKs’ update with the so-called “spatial audio” support, developer will be able to deliver more realistic audio experiences in their virtual reality apps, and users will have an even greater experience when using them instead of the older apps which could only deliver realistic images, but lacked the immersive sound they can now feature. The 3D audio the Google Cardboard will now deliver will shift between audio channels, depending on the position of the user’s head in order to create an audio experience that resembles the one we get in real life. Sound won’t only come from the right or the left side, but also from above, beneath, the front or the back of the user. Basically, it will be a 360-degree sound, which will create a realistic audio experience.

The direction the sound comes from is not the only thing that will create the realistic audio experience, the update also allows developers to manipulate sound depending on the space the app is meant to recreate. The software will be able to mimic how different spaces, such as forests, caves, auditoriums absorb or change the sound we hear. According to the aforementioned blog post, the spatial audio update won’t have any major impact on the CPU of the smartphones that are used with the Google Cardboard.