As most of us know, video conferencing can be a boring, tiresome affair
Latency, network reliability, visual and audio fidelity can all contribute to a fatiguing experience
Can we do better with the reproduction of audio?
We shouldn't reinvent the wheel, current implementations aren't too bad...
but they weren't considering user experience for daily use!
Core idea: Let's start with audio and focus on the goal of telepresence for more realistic conversations
Nearly all videoconferencing apps transmit mono audio in multiparty contexts
Spatialization would be difficult from an acoustic perspective, but most of us use headphones anyway...
A videoconferencing system is a sprawling, complicated beast
I needed a free & open-source app that was purely web based
Serve as a template for this novel integration
There's a lot to say about teleconferencing and how we might best experience each others' voices over the net
Similar works that have tested this idea
A balance between over-programming and over-writing
An open source video conferencing platform
An api in Javascript for working with audio
Working with a mature application, in React (a library built on top of Javscript) is hard
Just understanding the ecosystem, finding the audio, was challenging
The difficulty was compounded when making changes that needed to propogate
To see how binaural audio in a standard conferencing layout might affect a number of metrics and user opinions - stay tuned!
A little more serious examination of performance