Microsoft 3D Spatial Sound is integrated into the system on Xbox and Windows devices for native support and developers can work with it right away. The platform abstracts audio as positional objects so you can simply provide the sound and position and it takes care of the rest. You don’t have to worry about the audio output format or whether there are two speakers, a home theater setup, or headphones. Because it’s built into the system, consumers can select where they wish to output playback from the system level, whether through their speakers or headphones.

Microsoft 3D Spatial Sound works as a single API and content authoring path on both Xbox and Windows, supporting two types of sound objects:

Static sound objects that represent a position relative to the listener, mapping to speakers on a channel bed of up to 8.1.4.4.
Dynamic sound objects that have a true position in the world space with the 3D audio representation handled by the audio engine.

It also allows for concurrent playback of both spatial and non-spatial audio for uses such as playing music or providing ambiance in the background of the game.

On the console — currently the entire Xbox One family of consoles including the new Xbox Series S and Xbox Series X — 3D Spatial Sound is hardware-offloaded. Your game won’t need to worry about spatial audio taking up any CPU resources on Xbox.

A key feature of 3D Spatial Sound is that it’s focused exclusively on sound positioning simulation, mapping sounds to speakers or virtually over headphones. It doesn’t do anything else, so you have control over your audio engine for other aspects of your game’s sound design, such as attenuation or doppler effects. You provide the sound and the platform just places the sound you created into the virtual 3D audible space where it needs to be.

For bespoke audio rendering engines, you can use the ISpatialAudioClient audio API directly and start integrating spatial sound into your game. Spatial Sound also supports middleware, with plug-ins for all major solution providers.

Deeply Immersive Game Audio with Spatial Sound

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