After listening to Joel De Ross's fascinating Ted X Talk on the future of music and virtual reality it inspired me to keep thinking outside the box and dream of creative ideas and projects that haven't been thought of before. His speech really shows innovative ideas that will educate, fund and entertain musicians and everyone involved into the future.
I'm sure everyone has heard the phrase "everything has been done before" followed by a sigh and thought process of giving up. It's much easier to give up and resign to this mental perspective then to challenge existing ideas and inventions. I read once that it's the creative people that will come up with the future inventions and not so much the people that are able to make the concepts reality.
I guess this blog is all stemming from my burning desire for the next wave of virtual reality technology to become the most wanted platform and change the gaming industry forever. From what I can see this present time in history will go down as time when virtual reality started to become mainstream and readily available from many different manufacturers.
Zero Latency Melbourne
What does this mean for me as an audio engineer / sound designer?
With the recent release of Dolby Atmos surround sound in cinemas and various virtual reality experiences like The Void in America and Zero Latency here in Melbourne demonstrates that: the industry is changing quickly and soon the gaming industry will be asking for a new sound experience to match that of Dolby Atmos. Can you imagine being in a space like Zero Latency has without having to wear headphones which makes you feel very isolated and hard to hear fellow players. Instead you would have 50+ speakers around the room like a cinema. Going one step further than this what if some of those speakers were 3D speakers planted inside the space creating sounds you can walk around! To me that is an awesome concept, one i''m sure is either to expensive or "hard" to implement at the moment.
For me to be at the forefront of virtual reality sound design I need a firm understanding of surround sound mixing and recording techniques. In fact after reading here it seems not much changes for the recording process it is mostly handled in the mixing stage.
With the release of Samsung's new audio lab in California and the radiant R7 hitting the shelves it seems inevitable that a further breakthrough will not be to far away.
So how, when, where and who will release the next big design and concept in audio? I would love to think a whole new speaker could be designed inspired from bio mimicry
Will the same speaker concept still be relevant in 100 years? I wouldn’t think.