Re: [orientation-sensor] Head orientation tracking (#68)

@reillyeon 

> My first instinct is that spacial audio should be supported by Web Audio and other web media playback APIs so that browsers and operating systems can handle integrating input from the IMU on behalf of the page. I understand however that in a developing field there may not be sufficient standards to completely offload this processing and so allowing the developer to implement their own audio processing is the faster route.

While I agree that it would be unrealistic to supply an never ending list of playback APIs, I just want to point out some counter arguments to help your side progress, there is not and will not be a definitive single use of "spatial audio" or what "spatial audio" means. We are trying to help conversations like this [by giving rough and hopefully unbiased technical definitions](https://research.mach1.tech/glossary/) [[our biased version here](https://research.mach1.tech/posts/spatial-audio-defined-by-different-companies/)].

We are already seeing that there are many ways to approach "spatializing audio" to a listener and some of them introduced by companies like Dolby do not even include interactivity or headtracking, forcing other companies like Apple to make up their own version of headtracking applied to audio processing which has completely cutoff access to creators and developers and highly limits quality and usage. Situations like this might likely continue until it is agreed that the term is not referring to a single way to handle audio but instead an expectation of interactivity or immersion to the end-user. In our opinion the first step should be aggregating all devices and orientation methods in a way that allows new emerging devices to easily be added so that all the different "spatial audio" use cases can make use of this instead of just the ones contributed to by select companies with siloed user expectations. 

I hope this helps clarify but a great use case how things are currently blocked is to imagine musicians who are making orientation based interactive spatial music content but cannot distribute them anywhere due to these limitations at this current day.

> From a standards perspective then it seems like it would be useful to specify a HeadOrientationSensor, OrientationSensor({ 'position': 'head' }), or similar so that the behavior of libraries providing such sensors can be consistent across implementations.

This sounds smart and inline with our experiences!

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Received on Friday, 3 December 2021 19:27:00 UTC