Immersion

These days, media is all about immersion. Big screens, surround sound, and high definition are musts in millions of homes across North America. Technologies such as motion control and 3d movies are becoming increasingly popular. Movie theaters have begun adding rows of moving seats, allowing the audience to "feel the action".

I could go on about hundreds of advancements in immersion technology, from mind-controlled games to holophonic sound, but one advancement in online video game programming has particularly piqued my interest. For many years, gamers have been able to play with each other online, and even communicate with each other through microphones and headsets. This is neat, but in competitive games, it becomes hard to strategize with those on your team if everyone in the game can hear what you're saying. Eventually options were created so that only teammates could hear what other teammates were saying, but problems arise from this as well; players aren't able to communicate at all with the enemy team, and from an immersion standpoint, it is unrealistic to be able to stand behind an unaware enemy while yelling at teammates or discussing plans.

Recently, innovations in video game sound programming came up with the most realistic solution - when a player speaks into the headset, the game judges the distance between them and other players and outputs volume accordingly. In other words, the farther away you are from the speaker, the quieter their voice is. This solution provides the greatest level of immersion; if you're sneaking up on an enemy, you actually need to be quiet. If you need to say something to your teammate, you actually need to get close to them. If you need to yell something across the battlefield, you actually have to yell.

Sometimes we forget that the simplest solutions are often the best. Immersion is about taking a fantasy experience and making it feel real. That's the idea behind 3d movies, that's the idea behind motion control, and while it seems like such a simple concept, sound distance programming makes an online gaming experience just a little more real.