Big VR is taking spatial audio seriously — wareable.com

Yet another promising crowdfund project bit the dust this week - the 3D audio, made-for-VR Ossic X headphones which raised over $3.2 million on Kickstarter and Indiegogo. A healthy haul of 23,000 orders were placed online but in the end Ossic was only able to deliver 250 units. It seems, though, that this latest failure is more damning of how difficult it is for innovative startups to succeed - Creative's similar Super X-Fi headphones cost $100m+ to develop - than the potential for spatial audio, where sounds are placed and reproduced not just in stereo but in 3D space including above, below and behind you. The impact spatial audio could have on the sense of immersion while wearing VR headsets and future augmented/mixed reality eyewear could be enormous. That's one of the reasons why in early 2016 Ossic was one of the first batch to join Abbey Road Studios' Red incubator program, for innovative music tech startups.

Read More