Thought Kaiju Fury, Paul McCartney, and Black Mass were cool before? Just wait till you hear it with Dolby Atmos surround sound technology.

VR enthusiasts know how important audio is to have a truly immersive VR experience. Dolby Atmos and their object based audio technology allows viewers to experience sound in VR as they would in real life. 3D audio essentially hacks your brain and emulates the workings of the human head. So if someone is whispering in your ear, you feel as if they are right there. If Paul McCartney is rocking out with his band, you’ll hear it exactly as the band was positioned when playing.

In the mobile world we have craved audio with big base and crisp high notes. We had surround sound… not three dimensional audio, and the two are very, very different.

Where as surround sound uses multiple speakers to create a 360-degree field around the listener, 3D sound recreates exactly what your ears would hear in any given scenario. Until the reemergence of VR we had no real need for objective based 3D audio. Now that we can plug in and sit front row of a concert we don’t just want to see it as if we were there, we also want to hear it as if we are right there.

This is a big move for Dolby, a company that has no real consumer product of its own but rather licenses it’s audio technology to product makers. It will be very interesting to watch how they come in and compete with companies like VisiSonics and their RealSpace 3D Audio, who already has a partnership with Oculus.

[source: The Verge]