[jeffpeterson]

Aha! I'm a huge fan of positional voice audio in video games. Mumble has a positional audio feature[0] that is relatively straightforward to integrate via mods. I built a mod[1] recently that adds support to Raft, and I attempted to list some of the benefits in the readme. In my experience, it completely changes the feeling of talking with people online; they become their avatars. I'd love to see it come to discord or zoom, and be lifted out of the video game space.

I haven't looked at Mumble's actual implementation, but I imagine it's possible with the web audio APIs.

[0]: https://wiki.mumble.info/wiki/Positional-Audio [1]: https://www.raftmodding.com/mods/mumble-link

[ryukafalz]

I love that Mumble has that, but I wish it were possible/easy to enable it without a video game and manually position participants.

As for webapps, I think Mozilla Hubs does this: https://hubs.mozilla.com/#/

...as does Freeswitch I believe, though I've had a heck of a time trying to get that up and running: https://freeswitch.org/confluence/display/FREESWITCH/mod_con...

[jka]

You might be interested in https://www.calla.chat/ ( https://github.com/capnmidnight/Calla ) which supports spatialized audio based on participant location on a top-down map.

Edit: in some ways, this might be totally off-base since it does involve a game and participant self-arrangement. Hopefully it's somewhat relevant, though!

[ryukafalz]

I could be wrong, but based on the README this looks like it just sets speaker volume based on position - which is neat, but is not quite positional audio.

[jka]

I wondered about that too, and found https://github.com/capnmidnight/Calla/commit/abc851b49bd1801... before commenting which seemed to indicate that there's at least stereo positioning. It's possible I'm mistaken though.

[ryukafalz]

Oh interesting, it looks like you're right! They do appear to be using a StereoPannerNode rather than the full 3D PannerNode[0], but that is more than just speaker attenuation.

[0] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Web_Audio_A...

[moron4hire]

That's an old commit. It's had spatialized audio for the last month, at least.

I'm actually going to put a feature back in to let you select the audio "spatialization" model, because some folks have had trouble with PannerNode not working right. I used to have a selection between volume scaling, StereoPannerNode, and PannerNode. Been a little too busy at the day job to do it lately.

[SOLAR_FIELDS]

The now defunct Dolby Axon had this feature for up to 50 people. It was great, you could drag people in a grid around you (see picture in [1]). I’m still sad they discontinued it, it’s one of the few voice chat services that I would gladly pay money for.

[1]: https://venturebeat.com/2009/09/04/dolby-launches-axon-surro...

[anateus]

I made a proof of concept chrome extension a bit ago: https://github.com/anateus/amphisonic

Currently re-writing it to be actually decent code. Basically, it takes up streams on the page and arranges speakers in a semi-circle in front of you, letting you adjust the radius (I've found for particular numbers of speakers there's an optimal radius for speaker separation).

[SirYandi]

I would love for MozIlla hubs (or any similar app for that matter) to allow one to set a webcam feed as your avatar's "head".

If anyone knows of such a thing please let me know. Would be perfect for socialising during quarantine and beyond.

[zumachase]

It's at the other end of the spectrum, but Remotion is really cool and does what you describe. We wanted to get away from always on video, but I know lots of people like that. I cannot say enough good things about what the Remotion team are doing.

[schwartzworld]

Kosmo.io has a poker app where your webcam feed sits at your seat at the table.

[taxidump]

I have some multi-tenant PBXs based on Freeswitch however, I have not seen a positional audio feature in Freeswitch. Can you give more insight? Your link is the conference module and unrelated I believe.