Microsoft’s new Gears of War now features an amazing new sound engine called Triton which creates more realistic sound which responds to the virtual environment it is created in, resulting in realistic reverb which lets users know if they are in a hallway or cathedral just by ear.
The technology creates a voxel map of an area with accurate reverb characteristics for each material and then applies realistic echo/reflection effects to the soundscape. It is based on work by Microsoft researchers Nikunj Raghuvanshi and John Snyder titled “
Parametric Wave Field Coding for Precomputed Sound Propagation.”
video demo
This is different from the current state of the art, which merely muted sound based on distance and obstruction.
“The occlusion and obstruction values that Triton gives our game are really, really accurate to every listener position permutation possible on the map,” said Gears 4 audio director John Morgan.
“A lot of people would be like, ‘Why does it sound like I’m in a bathroom when I’m going through this hallway?’ People playing the game didn’t understand why it was wrong, but it felt wrong to them,” Morgan said. “A big part of that is how does the dialog sound? How do the weapons sound? How does the reverb of that space, or the acoustic properties of that space sound? If you get it wrong, people will notice right away.”
