I posted a topic about making a mod like this in the mods forum, but i just thought it would be cool to get the general opinions on either Skyrim or the next elder scrolls game being reworked with Binaural tech. If you don't know what it is, check out these links; use headphones, and closing your eyes helps! ^_^

http://www.holophonic.ch/archivio/testaudio/Cereni%20-%20Holophonic.mp3

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wT1XuB95qMk&feature=watch_response_rev

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IUDTlvagjJA

That's awesome! If you made a mod using that tech (I take it that was what you were posting in the mod forum for?), I would defo be interested!

is that just messing around with the left and right speakers? cause it sounds much better than everything my speakers have ever produced. seriously sounds like all that noise is actually happening right behind them or something.

whatever sorcery it is, it would really add to the immersion i think :thumbsup: .

Yeah, what it does is it uses two microphones on opposite sides of a fake head, and then each mike is connected to your headphones. Essentially, it duplicates your real head during the recording process, making it almost impossible to tell the difference between the two.

It has so many possibilities, it's just ridiculous.

Really this process of using two mics to record 3d sounds only works with a mp3 or wav file like this. You gotta remember that in a 3D game like skyrim the positions of sounds are completely dynamic. So recording sounds like this would only work in 100% scripted scenes where the player is only in one predetermined location.

tldr: this can't work in a 3D open world game like Skyrim.

Why? If surround sound works, shouldn't this work too?

Xlafa explained it perfectly..A game like Skyrim using 5.1 sound dynamically positions sounds around the player based on their position. The technique described here creates the illusion of 3d sound. Hence to make it work, it would only work if you predetermine the position of the player. So cutscenes etc.

You still haven't explained WHY. The sound has to come from somewhere, and it has to reach your character; the further away something is, the less noise it makes, so that already exists. Couldn't you just expand the sound reception points from 1 to 2, on each side of the PC model's head?

It works in real life, why wouldn't it work in the game?

Surround sound works because in a traditional game, the player is treated as a ponctual object (a single microphone) and the game only has to calculate which direction you are facing to divert the sound to each headphone accordingly, only changing the volume of the sound. With surround, if sound is coming from the right, then the right earphone will play louder. This is a decent method to simulate directional sound, but not actually how it works in reality.

Binaural recording is the actual real deal. Rather than work off volume, it works by exploiting the brain's ability to triangulate the microscopic difference in time between the sound waves reaching each ear to pin point the source. It works well for recordings, because while you listen to a recording, you stay immobile and it is the source that is moving around you. Which means that the recording is always the same, and no calculations are involved computer side. Your brain does all the work.

Which means that to make it work within a game where both the player and sound sources are constantly in movement, you would need an algorithm to fake a millisecond discrepency between each hearphone in real time depending on position and facing of both the player and NPCs/creatures/leaves/rocks falling/buckets being dropped/etc. Which I guess would be quite a a massive resource hog.

In short, using the technology in games is totally possible software side, but current hardware would not be able to keep up.