AES explores new realities

WORLD: The Audio Engineering Society’s Technical Council (AESTC) has established a new group with the aim of advancing ‘the science and application of audio for new realities’. The group will therefore be serving those in the audio industry who are working with VR and AR applications and will operate under the Audio for Games Technical Committee to begin with.

‘This is an exciting and new area for the AES as an organisation,’ said Michael Kelly, vice chair of the technical committee. ‘A large number of our society’s members already have strong expertise in this emerging area. The Games Technical Committee is a great starting point for the group, but it is not the end-point. We are seeking expert stakeholders in all application areas. We are looking at synergies across these areas but also at what makes them unique.’

Dr Gavin Kearney, a researcher and lecturer at the University of York, has been appointed as the group leader. ‘A core responsibility of the group will be to define a roadmap for the AES to address emergent applications in new realities,’ he said. ‘The group will consist of industry professionals working at the forefront of commercial technologies for virtual, augmented and mixed realities as well as key academics in the field whose audio research crosses new multidisciplinary boundaries. Our initial objectives will include collating the state of the art in audio for new realities across recording, composition, sound design, spatial audio, environmental analysis and auditory scene synthesis, in order to develop technical workflows that are practical and relevant to the industry and creative practitioners in the field.’

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