Meet the Oculus Audio SDK

At Oculus, we’re committed to providing great tools to help developers make persuasive experiences – games that make you truly forget where you are, and that bring you into other worlds. We’re pleased to move our Audio SDK out of beta, and give our mobile and PC VR developers a free set of powerful tools to provide 3D audio with their games and applications.

The Audio SDK accurately reproduces the cues we instinctively use to track the location of sound sources in space by simulating the effect that a listener’s environment and body have on sounds. For a more detailed discussion of how it works, see our Introduction to Virtual Reality Audio.

The Audio SDK supports a large number of sound sources, strong directional cues, early reflections, and late reverberations. It supports spatialization and environment modeling with the upcoming Oculus Rift, Oculus DK2, and Samsung Gear VR.

The SDK itself primarily consists of spatialization plugins for the game engines Unity and Unreal, for audio middleware such as FMOD and Wwise, an AAX plugin for Avid’s Pro Tools, and a VST plugin for Windows and OS X. The OSP for Digital Audio Workstations allows spatializing audio upstream of middleware or game engines – see our Digital Audio Workstations and VR Audio blog post for more information.

These plugins are easy to install and use, and they provide fast and effective 3D audio with room ambiance to give your application lifelike spatialization. To make it even easier to get started, we are also releasing the Oculus Audio Pack, a free library of over 500 high-quality sound effects designed specifically for virtual reality.

We’re excited to be working with industry leaders like Audiokinetic and FMOD to develop these tools.

“Audiokinetic Wwise has helped us create benchmark VR audio experiences for our developers and the world,” explained Brian Hook, head of audio at Oculus. “By supporting them and other key audio middleware companies, the transition from traditional game audio to high-quality VR audio is as seamless as possible for many companies.”

Audiokinetic CTO Martin Dufour agrees, adding “We believe that audio is a critical element to help create a truly immersive VR experience. We are very excited to be working with Oculus, a global VR leader, and their Wwise support in the Oculus platform. Our team is dedicated to providing additional innovative VR audio tools for the platform.”

Matthew Connor, General Manager of Firelight Technologies Pty Ltd, notes “The team at Oculus have done an incredible job of bringing the dream of VR to life. Great audio is critical to the experience, and Firelight is excited to support the Oculus Audio SDK with FMOD and the upcoming www.fmod.io service, providing the most easy to use and fast audio workflow for VR.”

The Oculus Audio SDK is now available as a free download from our Downloads Page – try it out and take your application to the next level in VR presence!