IMMERSIVE TOOLS
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mmersive experiences are becoming the new norm,
quenching our thirst for realism in everything we do. Why watch a movie on a TV when you could watch it via a virtual reality (VR) headset? Why listen to music on a single speaker when you could
install a surround sound system? These are the rhetorical questions the industry is currently addressing. To achieve true immersion, the technology must be advanced enough to convincingly simulate reality. This often involves tricking the senses – namely sight and sound – with spatial audio, holographic humans, larger-than- life LEDs or headsets and haptic suits. Over the following pages, we dive into the companies, technologies and case studies at the forefront of today’s immersive experiences. LOST IN SPACE Immersive audio has technically existed since the emergence of surround sound, first used in the forties at a screening of Disney’s Fantasia . The film included various audio channels and speakers to give the audience a sense of sonic movement, making it seem as though Flight of the Bumblebee was flitting around the room. After that, surround sound took off, eventually making its way into home movie theatres and stereo set-ups. It wasn’t until 2012 – when Dolby debuted its Atmos technology – that surround sound unofficially rebranded to ‘spatial audio’. Now, everyone wants spatial audio – in their headphones, in their homes, even in their auditoriums and arenas. While a sense of immersion is relatively easy to achieve on a small scale, larger spaces are a slightly different story. “Big venues bring different issues than a studio,” begins Sjoerd Wierda, sales engineer at Audio Acoustics. “Live sound is always more hands-on than studio work. In movie theatres it’s about playback, but in a live environment – where you move from space to space, from venue to venue and have different room sizes – that’s a different beast.”
The future of audio isn’t just about adding more speakers, but intelligently placing them to simulate real-life soundscapes whatever the venue
essentially adaptable environments that can vary their acoustic properties. “You can choose to have a simple loudspeaker for variable acoustics, which works, but it doesn’t have the range and the output needed for immersive audio – what we think the future will bring. In the next ten years, you will see a big jump into immersive audio.” Together, Audio Acoustics and industry partner Adamson created a multi-purpose system that blended Adamson’s immersive engine (which ‘has a great size, good channel count and really nice user layout’, according to Wierda) and an audio server ‘where we can matrix all the electro-acoustic signals’. “It was powerful enough to do all the back-of-house – so all the paging, background music, recording, hearing aid assistance – on one big platform. It’s quite unique what we did over there,” Wierda explains. In the age of immersive audio, Wierda notes that while it might be tempting to simply increase the number of speakers, this won’t achieve the desired result. Rather, it’s about the placement and amplification. “You can benefit from having good placement of a sound source,” he notes. “You can sit down and think: ‘I see a singer or a guitarist here, but the sound is coming from there’. That’s quite a big thing,” Wierda explains, attributing it to decreasing
Audio Acoustics recently renovated the Theaterhotel De Oranjerie – a live concert venue in Roermond, Netherlands. “It’s a standard theatre; roughly 500 to 600 seats,” says Wierda. “They were looking for a partner to do a complete remodel of the whole theatre – front of house, back of house and so on. They wanted to be able to cater to the orchestras without doing a complete rebuild. “We had a discussion about variable acoustics,” Wierda continues, which are
Combining science and art, Twist Museum challenges our perception
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