Video Examples from: Establishment and Implementation of Guidelines for Narrative Audio-based Room-scale Virtual Reality using Practice-based Methods

This video accompanies our paper: Popp, C. and Murphy, D.T., "Establishment and Implementation of Guidelines for Narrative Audio-based Room-scale Virtual Reality using Practice-based Methods", held at the 2022 AES International Conference on Audio for Virtual and Augmented Reality.

Room-scale Virtual Reality (VR) presents sound designers with new challenges to tell stories with audio in games with player-driven narratives. These challenges arise from the player moving in and interacting with the virtual environment. The paper performs a small scoping review of VR/non-VR games and associated literature to identify issues and solutions to the placement of speech-based audio using practice-based research methods. The review leads to the proposition of design guidelines and strategies for their implementation. The paper advocates that each instance of speech-based audio should be short, interactive, and complemented by non-speech audio. Furthermore, each instance’s spatial, interactive, visual, aural, and narrative representation should be considered in combination. The paper also suggests that 3D-binaural audio informed by physics can aid storytelling and make virtual environments player-responsive.

The paper is part of the research project SuperCharging Audio Storytelling: 3D Audio in Virtual Reality, funded by UK Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) XR Stories Creative Industries Cluster project, grant no. AH/S002839/1. More information about the project can be found at XR Stories. Firelight Technologies Pty Ltd and Unity Technologies kindly provided non-commercial licenses for research purposes as part of this research project.