Experience HOAST360, the higher-order Ambisonics 360° video player with acoustic zoom.
Check it out! What is it about?
On this website you can listen to higher-order Ambisonics audio content, delivered together with 360° video. Simply drag on the video canvas with your mouse to change the field-of-view for audio and video rendering. Use your mouse wheel to zoom in and out, visually as well as acoustically. All the audio content on this website is rendered binaurally, i.e. special filtering is applied to mimic the filtering your ears apply to all the audio sources around you, making you able to localize them in 3D space. This technology can only work properly if you wear headphones!
Please note that the player will not work in Safari browsers due to lacking OPUS support. Also, the combination of 360° video rendering and dynamic higher-order Ambisonics binaural rendering is computationally demanding, which is why HOAST360 will not work on mobile devices and on some older computers. If playback is not smooth, consider lowering the video quality by using the settings dropdown menu of the player. Lowering the video resolution will NOT impair audio quality.
If you have a VR headset you can use it on this website and fully immerse yourself. When accessing this website on the Oculus Quest or in recent versions of Firefox or Chromium-based desktop browsers with your HMD plugged into your computer, the video player automatically adds a VR symbol to the lower right for activation of the VR environment (so far tested with HTC Vive, Oculus Rift and Oculus Quest). For VR headsets to work in (desktop) Chrome you need to set certain flags, please have a look at our readme here.
Ambisonics uses Spherical Harmonics (depicted on the right) to create a full-sphere 3D representation of the audio content. The number of Spherical Harmonics, as defined in the Ambisonic order, determines the spatial accuracy of the audio rendering. On this website you can listen to up to fourth-order Ambisonics, corresponding to 25 Spherical Harmonics and 25 audio channels.
HOAST360 is the higher-order Ambisonics audio, 360° video player used on this website. HOAST360 is open source, feel free to use it for your purposes. You can find the sources here. If you have contributions to the player you think others would find helpful, please add a pull request on GitHub. Also, if you find bugs or have feature requests, GitHub is the place to add them. All the technical details regarding the player are described in an AES eBrief.
The HOAST360 player is developed by Thomas Deppisch and Nils Meyer-Kahlen. The website frontend and backend are developed by IOhannes zmölnig and Benjamin Hofer. Server setup and administration is done by IOhannes zmölnig. The work is supported by Gerd Grupe, vice rector of the University of Music and Performing Arts Graz, via a knowledge transfer project led by Matthias Frank, Daniel Rudrich and Franz Zotter of the Institute of Electronic Music and Acoustics. The uploaded content is licensed under a Creative Commons license. Content uploaders are solely responsible for not offending any personal rights and intellectual property. We do not provide any warranty.
Do you want your work to be part of this media library? Contact us!
As there currently is no upload area, we need you to provide all material via email (where applicable) resp. download links. If you use a file hosting service (such as Dropbox), please make sure that no login is required to download the material and that the material can be downloaded at a decent speed (when using the service without a login).
I hereby certify that I hold the copyrights of the following audiovisual recording:
I give my consent and take responsibility to have it published and made online-available on the platform https://hoast.iem.at under the Public Domain (CC0) license.
I grant to the publishing service, that is offered for free, to hold itself harmless in case of later complaints or complications that may arise from the publication.
I declare that I have formally granted and preserved the personal rights and intellectual property rights of the composers/authors/recording engineers/persons involved the production, and I hold the corresponding signed forms.
I acknowledge my right of withdrawal of the publication of the said audiovisual material under https://hoast.iem.at that allows me to have it removed from the online presence and have its digital copies deleted. I may use the right of withdrawal anytime without stating reasons.
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