In the complexities of crafting a visually compelling virtual world, it is easy to forget the importance of sound in creating a fully immersive experience. If virtual reality is meant to transport the user to a new world, then the more senses involved, the more complete the experience feels. Much like video, capturing sound for VR purposes is extremely different from traditional audio recording. How sound is captured in 3D space greatly impacts the polish of the final product.

There are many tools to capture 3D sound. I find binaural audio capture extremely well-suited for VR, as almost all VR devices use headphones to deliver sound. Eventually, a 5.1 surround system may also successfully increase a user's presence in a VR experience, but as the hardware standard continues to be headphones, VR content creators should record audio knowing that most people will be listening to it as it is directly pumped into their ears.

For this project, I utilized sounds on freesound.org. Because this is user-submitted content, all sounds are recorded with different techniques and hardware. Despite this, they all sound decent in my assignment 6 project, and I believe this is a testament to the 3D sound processing capabilities of Unity. As the player gets closer to the waterfall, its sound gets louder, and when the fish splashes in the water, the audio comes from the side of the headphones on which the river is. This sort of directional and positional sound is all done automatically through Unity, and helps to make the user feel like the sounds are actually happening in space.

The one trouble I did have with adding sound in Unity was adjusting volume levels. I needed to turn the volume of the waterfall down very low in order to hear the other noises, and limitations with Playmaker did not allow me to boost the volume of sounds triggered in Playmaker, only lower them.

Timing the sound was also difficult to do in Playmaker. For the splashing noise created when the fish jumps out of the water, I wanted to time the sound so that the user hears a splash when the fish exits the water and when it goes back under the water. I was unable to have this level of control in Playmaker. To work around this, I timed how long it took for the fish to jump out of the water and then return under the surface. I used Garageband to position the splash noises apart based on this time. This workaround was successful, but it would be nice for Unity and Playmaker to allow more granularity in determining when sounds play.

Though sometimes overshadowed by visuals, audio is a component of VR that can make or break the experience. I would like to see the audio tools in Unity improve to reflect this importance.