Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1521235
80 M PS E . O R G These can contribute beyond pure functionality to game-play immersion and entertainment. All sonic elements can be metaphorical, literal or hyper-real, but edutainment experiences offer significant creative scope beyond, for instance, training applications. Aesthetic and functional experience design must always be a consideration. The important Kansei qualities are all functions of perception. Audio localisation and envelopment are key to immersion, and these are functions of numerous perceptual aspects, most notably, HRTF compatibility when listening over headphones. Emitter reverberation should be a function of intended virtual distance, and in VR, acoustical cues should be aligned to the environment that they represent, and in MR/AR, the acoustics of the surrounding real environment need to match those of virtual aspects. Audio-visual synchrony must be ensured and kept within the temporal-binding window. Presenting audio in 3D, particularly when externalised, appears to offer opportunities to improve dialogue clarity, cognition and information retention, and also to mitigate auditory fatigue. The Future of Audio in Immersive Storytelling Thus far, a perspective of the state of the art around audio in immersive storytelling has been presented, and the reader might wonder where this trajectory will lead in the near future. "First, there was mono, then stereo, and now, there's spatial audio"—implying that some believe that immersive audio is likely to become the dominant mode of consumer experience. Dolby Atmos® appears prevalent and is being deployed in digital audio workstations for content creation, and increasingly, streaming services are offering spatial audio, even with head- tracking. Apple has entered the XR marketplace with their spatial computing device Apple Vision Pro. It is quite possible that the complex and hybrid authoring solutions presented in this article will soon be replaced by integrated and streamlined pipelines. One current challenge in delivering immersive audio-visual and haptic experiences is processing power. Whilst some HMD's are tethered to a computer to get over this, there have been other attempts to prioritise tether- free portability, but such systems can struggle. The pervasion of 5G will come to offer sufficiently low latency and coverage to harness edge computing and lessen such bottlenecks. The recently released Apple Vision Pro offers unparalleled processing power compared to other stand-alone headsets on the market, thus demonstrating that tethered devices might soon be a thing of the past for a regular consumer, although dedicated location-based entertainment or VR content developers' workstations may still be the strong use cases. When technologies converge to facilitate the Metaverse, significant opportunities for the development of immersive storytelling will evolve. With visual aspects being prioritised, photorealistic worlds will abound with multimodality likely drawing from the precedent of gaming. However, games typically only allocate 10% of their memory and processing resources to audio, the difference will be that server-based processing will still likely have overhead for substantial audio improvements, way beyond those currently available natively. This will facilitate more evolved real-time room modelling and wave tracing, including position/ material-dependent reverberation re-synthesis, coupled spaces, and sonic object occlusion for more realistic acoustics in 6DoF scenarios. Real-time environmental sound synthesis is evolving rapidly and will bring highly manipulable virtual sounds of the real world to augment the room models, computer-generated sound worlds will offer enormous narrative possibilities. Higher parallelism in audio-playback streams will increase presentation options. Personalisation is a thread that is evolving through many aspects of the digital world, and with evermore effective noise-cancelling headphones with head-tracking and in-built HRTF personalisation functionality, it will be possible to exist in the dynamic sound world