Unreal Integration of Meta XR Audio SDK for Wwise

Integrating a Wwise project that uses the Meta XR Audio SDK Sink plug-in for Wwise consists of two steps:

Once you do those two things, you’re ready to use scripts provided by Audiokinetic together with the sound banks you author to create XR experiences in your Unreal project. To learn all about how to use Wwise within Unreal, we refer you to the Wwise Unreal integration documentation on the Wwise website.

Integrating Wwise into a pre-existing Unreal game is simple as it’s mostly done through the Wwise launcher.

After integrating Wwise into your game, you’ll need to copy the sound engine plug-ins from the unzipped download folder, i.e. the dynamic libraries from “/”DownloadFolder/Wwise/version/platform/architecture”, to the folder in your Unreal project where Wwise looks for plug-ins, i.e. “UnrealProjectFolder/Plugins\Wwise\ThirdParty\platform\mode\bin”. Note to replace “UnrealProjectFolder”, “DownloadFolder”, “version”, “platform”, “mode”, and “architecture” with your specific paths in the paths above. Moving the plug-in to the wrong directory will result in a lot of “Plug-in not found” errors in the Unity console. The error (along with other Wwise engine errors) will often list the offending plug-in’s class ID alongside the error message. The Class IDs for the Presence Platform Audio SDK Plug-ins for Wwise are below:

If the error message doesn’t contain one of those numbers, it’s most likely coming from another plug-in used by your Wwise sound bank.

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.

To adjust your room acoustics based on geometry or room properties, you will need to install and use the Meta XR Audio SDK for Unreal Plugin. Make sure to have completed the installation and setup before continuing.

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.

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

In your editor, you will need to add a Meta XR Audio Room component to something in the game. It is important to note that you should only have one of these components in your entire game because it is global. If you add multiple of these components, only the most recently added component will function properly and the older components will no longer change the effects.

Once you have added the component you can adjust the settings directly in the UI.

If you want the game to programatically change the room acoustics as the game progresses you will need to use the provided Blueprint functions to get and set the parameters of the component. To them to your Blueprint, right click on the Blueprint, uncheck the “Context Sensitive” checkbox and then search for “Get” or “Set” and the name of the parameter you want to change.

Make sure the Blueprint has access to your Meta XR Audio Room Acoustic Properties instance or create your only instance directly in the Blueprint. Drag the instance of the component onto the Blueprint and connect it to the target of the getter or setter function.

There is also a setter function which combines all the properties into a single Blueprint node called Set Room Acoustic Properties. This simplifies the setting process is you plan to change multiple parameters of the room at once.

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

There is a second component in the Unreal plugin that functions exactly as the Meta XR Audio Room Acoustics Properties component described above which is called Meta XR Audio Acoustics Settings. This component provides additional controls described below:

To take your spatialized mono sounds to the next level learn how to use Acoustic Ray Tracing.