Making Some Noise

Good question. We have a working beta and SDK at the moment, and based on feedback we get from developers, that will help dictate our go-to-market plans. Certainly we see voice immersion in games now, so we hope to do our best.

A lot of developers are quite interested, and certainly there's more and more voice communication happening in games now - but there are a lot of limiting factors. For example, the 'walkie-talkie paradigm' we talk about, where it's like there's a walkie-talkie strapped to your head. Everything's in mono, it's hard to understand - so we really want to solve those problems and enable a lot of creative gameplay opportunities for developers, and a much richer, more immersive experience for end-user gamers.

We think the immersion is very important. There are certain things, particularly like group communication that's a simple example we occasionally use. If there are four, five or six people all talking at once in a group, if everybody's in mono it's very hard to associate the voice with the actual game character.

With surround sound and a communication system like Dolby Axon it's very easy - you have a spatial audio cue. When you're playing a first-person shooter, for example, you can actually hear where your team-mates are, where your enemies are - so you get a competitive advantage.

Everything from practical communication to actual gameplay dynamics can be enhanced with the immersion.

One of the great things about the Axon system is that it will work on any pair of standard headphones or headset. So you're not required to go out and buy a particular special headset to use it.

If you have a 5.1 system, the gamer can actually select speaker set-up, and it'll work over that, or if they have a two-channel system they can use Dolby Virtual Speaker to virtualise the surround sound over that.

So no matter what playback environment the end user has the Axon technology will enable a surround sound experience.

We think it's applicable to basically all genres, from MMOs all the way down to a first-person shooter - some sort of squad-based action game. Also things like virtual worlds as well, obviously there's a lot of social interaction there.

There's a lot of change going on in the industry about new types of game genres and experiences, certainly in the online side we see that - so anywhere we think there's going to be social interaction, whether it's for co-operative team play, talking to someone or just hanging out and chatting with your friends, this technology will deliver a better experience.

The system's very robust, it was designed from the ground up for games, and one thing we know from just working with game developers in the past on surround sound is that the game producer/designer typically has a set of creative ideas about what they want to do.

Sometimes they'll want full spatialisation, full realistic immersion. Sometimes they want a simple channel-based chat experience. Our system can do either/or, in any number of variations. We can do everything from basic channel chat, we do hierarchical channels, all the way up to full surround sound. Or both - it's totally open through our API for the developer to integrate it the way they see fit.

We've specifically designed the evaluation SDK to make it as easy as possible to integrate it into games, so ultimately you'd have to ask a developer, but the feedback we've gotten so far is that it's pretty straightforward, for either new or existing games.

We don't have announcements at the moment, but obviously we're working with a lot of developers, we're going out to the industry, getting a lot of feedback, engaging with the development community.

Our approach is certainly to work with the game developers themselves to integrate the technology into their game, so that it's integrated totally into the experience they deliver.

We're not looking to be a third-party bolt-on separate voice system as much as really sitting with the producers and designers and working together to make the best voice experience for the game.

Certainly right now we're getting feedback from those types of questions, both from the development community, as well as gamers themselves - we've been doing some focus group testing.

We'll see where it heads, but I think our ultimate vision is to work directly with the development community. We think from a creative aspect, and our traditions, that working tightly with the creators themselves is very important to give the best experience.

That said, for certain applications or games that might not have voice communication, it doesn't necessarily preclude us from offering an out-of-game solution for when it's not available otherwise.

We have a definite strong global brand, but a lot of existing relationships as well with the development community. I think that certainly helps, and we're really trying to get feedback to make the best technology platform we can.

We see that actually as a core strength - we talk about the quality and experience, but with that in this particular technology platform, it's extremely scalable and extremely bandwidth-efficient. So to get full surround sound from the server to the client we use very, very little bandwidth. Depending on the setting the developer puts in you can get it down to an average of around 16 kbps.

Generally, in a lot of channel based systems, bandwidth scales linearly with the number of users. So if four people are talking, it can be four times the amount of one person talking, and onwards.

Our particular system, because it employs server-side mixing techniques, we can have ten or twenty people in a very complex set of surroundings without affecting bandwidth.

Certainly we see there's a lot of interest in voice communication - and not just that in itself, but an improvement in that experience. Everything from distance attenuation, surround sound, taking into account in-game geometry - when we sit down with gamer focus groups, they seem to just get it.

If the sounds of footsteps are going behind you but the voice is in mono, there's a mismatch. And if there's somebody in a different room, you don't get confused because the sound is leaking through, and you can hear someone talking that you shouldn't. It's very natural and easy to jump in and communicate.