Title: 3D audio in immersive movies
Movies are follow up of long tradition of arts. However, movies are more related to paintings than theatre. Of course, in movies, the paintings are moving and they speak like a radio, but the real immersion of theatrical expression is missing: your ability to look at scene part of your choice, follow the action where you please, and perceive the distance and experience the sound to come from its real source.
Now, technology to produce immersive movies is on the making, although there are still steps on the way. Also, directors will be facing new challenges, as the 360-degree perceptive field is more than a stage, and it becomes harder to catch the attention of the audience to carry the story line, but theatre directors have always known how to do this. Actually, directing an immersive movie is like directing in theatre with a very big stage [1].
Nokia, among many other companies is introducing cameras to catch the theatrical experience and augment this with special effects and framing trickery more suitable to the expectations of a movie than a play [2]. Light, set, script and of course the acting itself is important, but it is the sound that brings the finishing touch to the play.
Immersive real or virtual reality perception of environment requires well matching 3D audio. Brains process sound faster than vision. Sounds, especially 3D sounds, are essential for tasks that need fast judgement and awareness of environment. Positional sounds can reduce visual workload and improve awareness of information outside user's field of view. In Nokia, we have developed a process to record and render the sound in its true variability [4, 5].
References:
[1]
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/23/theater/sleep-no-more-enhanced-by-mit-media-lab.html[2]
https://ozo.nokia.com/vr/[4]
https://ozo.nokia.com/ozo_en/nokia-ozo-audio[5] T. Huttunen, E. Seppälä, O. Kirkeby, A. Kärkkäinen, and L. Kärkkäinen, " Simulation of the transfer function for a head-and-torso model over the entire audible frequency range," J. Comp. Acous. 15, 429 (2007).
