How to enable Spatial Sounds for your Holographic Application?

Spatial Sound expands the Mixed Reality (MR) experience beyond our visual experience. With Holograms appearing from the different directions and, by taking advantages of the spatial sound, as a developer, you can produce an immersive experience for your end users. By default spatialize sound option is not available for the Audio source. Let’s see how we can get this done.

Enable Spatial Sounds for your Holographic Application

From the Inspector window, navigate to Audio Source, and by default, you will see the following settings.

If you are new to the holographic application development, you can follow my series of post on my blog – Holographic App Development Using Microsoft HoloLens and would highly recommend following the Microsoft Mixed Reality Design documents

HoloLens uses Head Related Transfer Function (HRTF) to bring the 3D floating sound using the direction and distance of the object. To use this, you need to enable the HRTF Plugin first.

From the main menu navigate to Edit -> Project Settings -> Audio, and select “MS HRTF Spatializer” from the “Spatializer Plugin” dropdown.

Unity 3D – How to rotate an object around and also along with a specific point ?

That’s it. Now once you go back to the previous Audio Setting, you will have the Spatializer check box available. Make sure, you enable this Spatializer Checkbox.

In short, you need set the “Spatializer Plugin” to “MS HRTF Spatializer”. This will enable the Spatialize option available for Audio Source, you must select it. Other than this, you have to ensure, “Spatial Blend” is set to 3D. And, there are several settings under “3D Sound Settings” for each Audio Source. You need to set them accordingly to your project and audio experience requirements.