Martin Rieger Sound

The "VR year" never came. I've been promised it every year for a decade, and I still don't regret putting on my first headset in 2016.

A rollercoaster demo. Honestly, exhausting. But I turned my head, the picture turned with me, and one question wouldn't let go: why isn't the sound turning too?

A few weeks later I was on a barely roadworthy motorbike in Vietnam, 40°C in the shade, recording 360° sound for a VR documentary. I had said yes, even though almost nobody knew yet how sound for 360° worked.

Two years later that documentary became a study with LMU Munich. 40 people, same film, half of them with spatial sound. The ones wearing a headset for the first time didn't care whether the sound was spatial. They were overwhelmed. Quality only started to matter when they came back.

The headset stayed a niche. Head-tracked sound didn't: it ships in AirPods today.

Ten years in the carousel, from a rooftop in Vietnam to the heatmaps of that study.

So, ten years later: has sound become more important, or is it still as overlooked as it was back then?

Everyone arguing about smart glasses is staring at the wrong sensor.
The camera has a recording light. The microphones next to it have nothing.

And the questions being asked about that lens are fair ones.
Should it light up? Should people be able to tell when they are being filmed?
That light now has tamper detection: cover it or drill it out and the camera stops working.

Serious privacy design. For one sensor. The other one doesn't light up and seems to be running all the time.

Here is the part I haven't seen anyone raise. A camera has a field of view. You can stand outside it. Turn your back, step out of frame, sit one seat further along, and the lens doesn't have you.

A microphone, especially an array, has no frame.

Sound arrives from everywhere and the array decides what to keep. Worse: it is built to be good at exactly this. Multiple capsules at ear level, designed to isolate one voice from a room full of them. Distance and angle are the problem it was engineered to solve.

So the sensor with a boundary got the indicator.
The sensor without one got nothing.
And people are still afraid of "being filmed". Wow.

And those microphones aren't a side feature. Navigation, translation, memory, accessibility, hands free assistance. Every use case people list as the reason to allow these glasses runs on audio.

A Bitkom survey in 2026 found 82% of Germans want smart glasses to clearly show when they are recording. Not filming. Recording.
For me, this includes sound, but not from what I read from other glasses experts.

I work with microphone arrays for a living. If you can be heard without ever being looked at, the light on the front facing you is answering the wrong question.

We are debating the eyes of a device that mostly works through its ears.
Should microphones get their own recording light? Yes or no.

Too many people think 360° video and VR are the same thing.
For sound, the difference changes everything.

3DoF (360° video in a headset): you can look around, and the sound rotates correctly with your head.

But your position doesn't matter.

Walk closer to a sound? Nothing changes.
Move behind it? Nothing changes.

You have one finished linear mix, delivered as a multichannel file like Ambisonics or ASAF. The headset rotates that mix with your head.

6DoF (real VR): rotation plus translation.

Now your position becomes part of the mix.

Walk closer to a sound, it gets louder.
Move behind a wall, it gets muffled.
Change position, and the balance changes.

There is no single "final mix" anymore.

Instead, you deliver audio assets into a spatial audio system or game engine, and the renderer creates the mix in real time based on where the listener actually is.

That's not a small technical difference.

Same word on the briefing: "immersive."

Completely different production, tools and budget.

A 3DoF film is mixed once.

A 6DoF world is mixed every time someone steps into it.

So before asking "Which spatial audio format should we use?"

Ask:

Does the listener move?

Because the moment they do, your entire audio technology stack can change.