UE4 and Ambisonics future plans

Hello,

The recently announced Google Resonance audio SDK is able to play ambisonic sources, except in UE4. In general, Youtube and Facebook video can handle ambisonic decoding, even Unity can do it natively. I’m guessing this is probably due to some audio engine limitation with multichannel audio(?). Are there any short term plans of making UE4 ambisonic friendly? It is quickly becoming the standard for spatial audio in VR.

Cheers!

Good question. Also the Oculus Audio SDK does natively support ambisonics, but not in UE4. Any specific reason for this?

The reason is that time applies a natural constraint on development. :slight_smile: In other words, it’s just not been done yet and we’re working on it.

In principle, the new audio engine in UE4 naturally supports ambisonics decode the same way it would with other frameworks. I.e. multichannel audio in ambisonics format (or real-time encoding) would get sent to a submix mix and an ambi decode “effect” would decode the ambisonics format into the desired output format after applying the appropriate transformation according to the listener transform. However, the new audio engine pipeline is brand new and 3rd party developers are currently learning how it works. Hopefully, we’ll get native ambisonics file playback support soon as well as via 3rd party spatialization plugins.