Things are heating up on the cloud gaming front. As well as Google revealing its upcoming Stadia streamed gaming system last week, Microsoft has just announced a major new performance upgrade for the Project xCloud platform it first unveiled last year.
During a presentation on gaming sound delivered at the recent Game Developers Conference (GDC), Microsoft audio lead Steven Wilssens revealed that his team is working on bringing spatial audio to the xCloud experience.
This means that xCloud games will be able to benefit from soundtracks that place the sound from different objects in a game within a three-dimensional audio ‘bubble’, rather than just making sound effects appear to be coming directly from your speakers.
Already available on games for the Xbox One consoles and Windows 10 devices via Windows Sonic, Dolby Atmos and DTS:X implementations, spatial sound can transform the gaming experience - as anyone who’s experienced it in games such as Shadow Of The Tomb Raider, The Division 2 and Forza Horizon 4 will confirm.
This is especially true if you’re lucky enough to have a full spatial sound-supporting AV receiver and speaker system. But Microsoft’s headphone and built-in device speaker spatial sound implementations can also deliver game-changing results.
The device speaker support currently covers laptops, but as I reported last week, Microsoft is also working on bringing a spatial sound platform to Xbox One that works with the speakers built into TVs. Given the xCloud’s focus on working with mobile devices, it seems reasonable to assume that its ambitions will extend to speakers built into those, too.
While it’s been clear for some time now that Microsoft is highly focused on ramping up its spatial audio support (especially as it remains an area that the PS4 continues to be oddly reticent about), I really hadn’t expected to see spatial sound support turning up on Project xCloud. Partly because of the challenge of making the game streaming platform work in a low latency environment, and partly because of the difficulties of making xCloud work across the wide range of different devices Microsoft is targeting with it.
It’s still early days for Project xCloud, so not surprisingly no launch date for its Spatial Sound element was revealed in the GDC presentation. Rest assured, though, that the feature is definitely on the development roadmap; it’s not just an aspiration.
—
If you found this article interesting, you might also like these:
Xbox Games Will Soon Sound Better On Your TV
Xbox Is About To Get Another Great New Feature
Sony Hints At Overdue New PS4 Feature
Xbox Is Getting Another Game-Changing Feature
Something Weird Is Going On With Netflix On PS4 And Xbox One
