First person spatial audio - Constraints vs freedom
I've been experimenting a little with first person spatial audio. Just a small hobby project, but I'm trying to make exploration and navigating and interacting with the world as obvious and approachable as possible to untrained ears of sighted people like me.
I've wondered if it would be helpful to constrain the player movement to grids or nodes, and the turning so you snap to facing one of 4 or 8 directions. I can imagine a lot of benefits to limitations, but I'm having some doubts. Waypoints can make it easier to form a mental map of the space as a network of nodes. A grid would be similarly helpful. But maybe it's more useful being able to walk around freely and probe the edges of the environment or changes in surface. Or repositioning slightly to "triangulate" the origin of a sound.
If you're only ever facing cardinal directions or something more granular, you can reliably turn exactly as much as you want and not over- or undershoot. But again, turning slightly might be useful for locating sounds and there's lots of ways to implement audio landmarks or a compass. Maybe all you need is to make it really clear when you're facing an object directly with cues.
Of course the environments and objects will have to be laid out to suit the approach. If movement is constrained to cardinal directions, paths and corridors will also have to match. If turning is limited, then objects and connections to other nodes must be arranged appropriately around each node.
I definitely need to try more audio games where you navigate with spatial audio, and prototype more as well. But I'd love to hear some insights or opinions on this to give me a head start.
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