Spatialized Audio Support Plan

Based on the Unity Simulation Components / Systems section of the Supported Unity Features & Components page, the Audio component indicates there is no spatial audio support. Will this support be coming in the future? Is there possibly an idea on when it will be available?

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We don’t yet have a concrete plan or timeline for this, we’re still building out requirements based on customer needs. Can you add this request in our feedback portal (as well as the other feature requests you asked about) so we can keep track of them? Thanks!

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Any updates to the plan for supporting spatial audio?

Hi @Magic_Scott. Thanks for the question. Let me follow up on this and get back to you.

Thanks again for sharing your interest on spatial audio support @Magic_Scott! I’ve discussed this with our team and we’re unable to provide any detailed timelines at this time. We’d also recommend sharing this feedback on our feedback portal.

This is kind of weird since spatial audio is EXTREMELY important in AR and VR.

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Thanks for your input @quitebuttery! We’d appreciate you adding your feedback on this to our feedback portal

Yeah I submitted something–we at least need a port of the Unity spatialized SDK to visionOS–optimized for the chipset.

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@Jeremy2D3DXR I am hearing on the Apple side that spatialized audio will only be supported through the use of FMOD. Can you tell us if that is true? It has also been noted that there is an FMOD beta for visionOS becoming available (see https://discussions.unity.com/t/fmod-for-visionos/299280/). Do you know if spatialized audio will be possible through that beta?

Thanks for sharing this @OwlchemyDawson. I’m not sure off-hand but will do some checking on the Unity side and keep you posted.

Hey @OwlchemyDawson, thanks for flagging again. We won’t be able to comment on FMOD’s support, but Spatial Audio is something that we know is important and we’re still looking into it, and more concretely the workflows required to have it working.

Once we have more concrete information on how to achieve Spatial Audio, we will most definitely share back.

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It is working nicely in Wwise fyi.

I’d like to add some technical clarification here. Our docs have erroneously stated we don’t support spatialized audio on visionOS. This is incorrect; we do support spatialized audio for Unity Audio (implemented via FMOD internally) and have for some time, with the following caveats:

  • We don’t support some platform-specific effects applied by the RealityKit audio system that attempt to model the real-world acoustics of the room you’re currently occupying. This constraint is likely to remain for the foreseeable future, as switching entirely to use RealityKit audio would leave behind a range of Unity-specific features our developers rely upon.
  • When using a shared space, we do not have access to the user’s head position, and thus cannot drive Unity’s Audio Listener to spatialize appropriately. Instead, audio for a given app plays from the center of that app’s volume. In this mode, audio is spatialized, but it’s spatialized per volume rather than per object. We expect this won’t be an issue for small or distant volumes, but understand there may be cases - such as large volumes - where finer grained spatialization is required. However, we’re currently limited by the system’s affordances. We encourage you to submit feedback to Apple if this use case is important to you!

Other audio solutions - such as Wwise or third party FMOD solutions - will likely be subject to the same constraints for similar reasons.

(Previous post was deleted to repost with further clarification)

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Thanks for all the clarifications and context! For those of us doing fully immersive apps, it seems that we are unable to spatialize audio the way we’re used to. At the moment, it seems that all audio emits from the origin of the gray window that is present when you launch the app. The audio also mutes when that window is dismissed… I’m going to start a new thread about this, but thought I’d mention it here for those in the same boat.

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For anyone else who finds this thread: I’ve posted an explanation of what was happening with regards to spatial audio in fully immersive VR builds. TL;DR: there was a bug related to the gray “Loading…” window which will be resolved shortly, and as long as you have your audio sources set up properly, spatial audio should work if you apply that local workaround, or update to a (forthcoming) package version that includes the fix.

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Just in case anyone here is hitting the issue where audio stops working after the user removes the HMD, I’ve posted a workaround.

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Hey, circling back on this post - Unity audio with Project Settings>Audio>Spatializer Plugin set to none results in 3D audio (no elevation processing, and hard panning for left/right) and not spatialized audio. The AudioSource even hides the spatialize button in that instance because there is no algorithm to spatialize with.

Does Unity have an FMOD internally implemented spatializer that requires some sort of package installed?

Given recent news I’d appreciate a response as soon as you can. Thanks!

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I can’t answer your direct question, but I will say we have been able to do spatialized audio now with FMOD’s (in beta) Unity package, using Resonance as the spatializer (this is all setup thru FMOD Studio outside of Unity’s implementation). I’ll note that we are a fully immersive app that doesnt use Polyspatial…

Thanks for the quick response here @puddle_mike !
I didn’t realize until you said it that Resonance can build to iOS (and thus visionOS I assume?)
That’s interesting! I wonder if the same would work for the Resonance Unity plugin. I just need a spatializer that would build, because I assume the audio processing flow for a fully immersive app in visionOS is similar to all games in Unity, it’s just about the specific platform support.

I’ll note we did have to request a version of resonance that was compiled for visionOS from FMOD support (support@fmod.com), it doesn’t work out of the box…

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