Dolby Laboratories has been an audio leader in music, sound and movies for 45 years. Now it’s going to expand into the online games market with an audio chat system for gamers.
The Dolby Axon desktop client software lets gamers chat with each other in surround sound. If you’re in a virtual world such as World of Warcraft, you’ll be able to hear the direction from which sound is coming. If you’re standing with others in a group, you can tell which one is talking by the three-dimensional audio cues, as well as visual cues.
Dolby is late to this market, but its entrance means that 3-D Internet voice chat has come of age.
Users can create, join and interact in visual chat rooms with the Dolby Axon technology. The idea is to enhance the immersive feel of an online game by making it effortless to communicate with your friends. It’s an idea whose time has come because while graphics has advanced plenty, audio has been stuck in the dark ages, said Matt Tullis, senior marketing manager for games at Dolby.
The first game that used surround sound was King Arthur’s World in 1994. In games like that, you can hear someone sneaking up on you from behind — as long as you have the 5.1 speaker setup in a home theater. As games moved online, audio was often given minimal attention, partly because sophisticated audio could slow a game to a crawl. With Dolby Axon, now you can tell if a voice is “occluded,” meaning the character speaking is behind a wall.
Dolby’s a big public company with 1,200 employees. But it will face several competitors who have already launched their rival products. Ventrilo is popular in World of Warcraft. Others include Voxli, TeamSpeak, Xfire, Mumble, and Vivox. With Dolby’s product, as many as 50 people can participate in a voice chat. Dolby acquired an Australian firm, Spatial Voice Corp., a couple of years ago and has been working on Axon ever since.
Dolby has support from game companies that plan to integrate Dolby Axon into their games. Supporters include NetDevil, maker of JumpGate Evolution, and Kingsoft, creator of Mission Against Terror. The game developers use Dolby’s applications programming interface to implement Axon in their games.
Users can register for the beta starting today and the beta will start Sept. 27.
Come see the most promising new technologies unveiled for the first very time at DEMOfall 09 this September 21-23 in San Diego. VentureBeat readers may register to attend the conference at a special 20% discount off our regular rate. Register now at: http://www.demo.com/f9vb2
