This section of documentation will explain how to apply acoustics to your mono sound events.

By the end of this document, you’ll be able to:

Before you can spatialize sounds using the Meta XR Audio Plugin for Wwise, make sure to set up the sink plugin. See the steps in Set Up the Meta XR Audio Plugin for Wwise.

With the above configuration, we can start generating reflections and hearing acoustics. However, the Wwise plugin does not provide an interface to control the actual room itself (geometry, room materials, etc..). This is all controlled inside either Unity or Unreal instead, as the game engines are the location where these properties are setup.

In order to tell the Meta XR Audio SDK which of the two options to utilize, navigate to Edit > Project Settings > Meta XR Acoustics. Find the Acoustic Model dropdown and selected the desired option. Note that automatic will prefer the Raytraced Acoustics option if the project is setup to use it.

Recall that you can tell which model a component will be used for by observing the prefix of the name:

Important: If you would like to use Acoustics, proceed to the documentation specific to that engine. If you prefer to use the lightweight Static Room engine, continue reading on this page to learn about the Room Acoustic Properties component.

The room acoustics feature provides realistic spatial early reflections and reverb for a room. This creates a sense of space and helps to anchor spatial audio sources into the world. The room dimensions and materials can be manually configured to get a response that matches your scene. If there is no Room Acoustic component in the scene, a default room will be applied.

There should only ever be one instance of the Room Acoustics component in a scene. If more than one Room Acoustics. components exist in a scene, the behavior is undefined. It doesn’t matter where the Room Acoustics component is placed in the scene hierarchy. It can simply be added to an empty GameObject.

The properties of the Static Room acoustics engine are controlled by the Room Acoustics Properties component. This component will determine the sound of the reflections and reverb applied to sounds. A larger room will create a longer reverb tail, and harder materials will make the room more reverberant (louder reverb).

If Lock Position To Listener, is disabled, then the position of the listener within the room will have an effect on the sound, with reflections arriving sooner from walls that a listener is closer to, and reflections arriving later from walls that are further away. This is best used in scenes that consist of a single room. If Lock Position to Listener is enabled, this keeps the room centered on the listener (camera), so the sounds of reflections are independent of the user’s position.

If a scene has multiple rooms, and you would like to have different acoustics in each room, the properties of the Room Acoustics component can be updated at runtime.

There should only ever be one instance of the Room Acoustics component in a scene. Updating its properties (for example, changing the width, height, and depth) will immediately change the reflections and reverberation applied to sound sources. This effectively creates the illusion of moving from one room to another.

Determining when to update the properties is left to the developer. One option is to use invisible colliders placed in different parts of a scene that trigger a change in the properties when a player enters them.

The following table shows the reflection coefficients for each material for each frequency band.