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Audio is critical for creating a persuasive VR experience and can contribute strongly to the user’s sense of immersion. You can use the Oculus audio spatialization tools in Unreal to create the best audio experiences for your VR apps.
Use the Oculus Audio Plugin in Unreal
You can use the Oculus audio plugin in Unreal Engine by following the steps in the next few sections.
Before you enable the Oculus audio plugin, make sure you have explicitly enabled the Audio Mixer for Unreal. For more information, see the Unreal Engine quickstart guide.
Setup a Project to Use Oculus Audio
First enable the Oculus plugin for your project:
Open your project in Unreal Engine.
Go to Edit > Plugins, find Audio and check to select Oculus Audio Plugin.
Restart Unreal when prompted.
Select the plugin: Go to project settings and choose Edit > Project Settings, under Platforms > Windows, scroll to the Audio section at the bottom of the page. Then select Oculus Audio for both the Spatialization Plugin and Reverb Plugin. You can leave the other settings as-is.
The following image shows an example.
Make sure Late Reverberation is enabled for the Oculus Audio Plugin by going to Edit > Project Settings > Plugins > Oculus Audio and selecting Late Reverberation if needed.
The project is now configured to use the Oculus Spatializer.
Add a Sound to the Scene
Note: It is important that all sounds passed to Oculus Spatializers are monophonic. Stereophonic rendering will be handled by our spatialization, and must not be applied over additional stereophonic rendering provided by your game engine or library.
Select the scene you want to modify and:
Use the Import option to import a sound file into the Content Browser
Drag that sound asset into the scene.
Add a new Sound Attenuation object to the scene. Go to Add New > Sounds >Sound Attenuation.
Select the sound attenuation object and choose Edit. On the Details tab:
Set the Spatialization Method to Binaural
Under Attenuation Plugin Settings, add a new Oculus Audio Source Settings
The following image shows an example:
Use the Oculus Audio Source Settings to configure your sound source. You can reuse the attenuation settings object for other sounds. The following image shows an example of the settings for the Oculus Audio Source.
Audio Propagation (Beta)
The audio propagation feature provides real-time reverb and occlusion simulation based on game geometry, and consists of two new components:
Oculus Audio Geometry
Oculus Audio Material
To use the feature, you simply tag the scene meshes that you want included in the simulation and select the acoustic material for each mesh.
Set up Audio Propagation
Before you use the audio propagation feature, make sure you have the latest version of Unreal Engine that includes the latest Oculus Audio Spatialization plugin (v1.34 or later).
Follow the previous steps to set up the Oculus Plugin and add sounds to your project. Make sure that Late Reverberation is enabled for the plugin.
Add a static mesh actor to the acoustic simulation.
Select the actor in the scene and select Add Component then Oculus Audio Geometry Component.
To set the acoustic properties, select Add Component and then add an Oculus Audio Material to the mesh.
The following image shows an example:
Note: If you want all attached child actors to also be included in the simulation then check the “include children.”
You customize the acoustic properties of the children by adding an Oculus Audio Material to a child, and the material will propagate to any children of that child as well. Note that children which are included cannot be moved/rotated/scaled separately to the parent, if it needs to be independent then attach a Oculus Audio Geometry Component to the child.
Landscape and BSP
You can also use OculusAudioLandscape and OculusAudioBSP components, which include the landscape and/or BSP in the acoustic simulation. You cannot attach components to Landscapes or BSP objects, instead attach these to any actor in the scene.
Note: The virtual room width/height/depth and reflection coefficients are not used when propagation or dynamic room modeling is enabled.
