🥽🕹 The Metaverse's Secret Sauce

Happy Thursday Anon! Today we're discussing the Metaverse's secret sauce; sound.

Estimated read time: 1.06 minutes.

The most impressive part of VR and the Metaverse today is oddly sound.Why it matters: Sound is the one area of the Metaverse that is rapidly advancing in a faster way than display, cloud storage, and haptics. We can see these results today as it is one of the key selling points behind VR today; the sound is remarkable. State of play: Today it seems like every major company that has entered the Metaverse—or will—is exploring spatial audio.

• Apple: Apple Music has been exploring Spatial Audio to create immersive audio experiences.

• Meta: Meta's latest research places a special emphasis on having the Metaverse be as realistic as the real world in regards to audio. For example, if I'm speaking to you in a conference room in a virtual world and I whisper something to you—it would actually sound like a whisper and not normal speaking audio.

The future of work: If the workplace is supposed to be a virtual world 5-9 years from now you can't possibly hope to have people communicating in a Zoom call where everyone is roughly the same volume.Bet on it: As it stands, VR is one of the best ways to experience concerts and sound. Any company or protocol that finds a way to host virtual concerts would be something worth looking into.

The bottom line: The future of sound is surround and very easy to incorporate since most headphones or earbuds can do complex sound processing. In turn, it simulates the effect of multiple directional channels.