Accessibility: How to set my game to mix spatialized audio to mono?

Question

Hi, I'm interested in providing a feature to help the hearing-impaired. Often spatialized audio can negatively impact the experience for players who have hearing loss in one ear. I'd like to convert my current 7.1 mix to mono (via an in-game setting), or instruct wWise to do so. Is this a supported feature? Is there a recommended way to implement this?

Thanks!

Answer 1

Hey, I have the same issue, do you found a solution ? (I hope for you since your question was ask 2 years ago ahah)

Comments

There are a few options, and we haven't found a perfect solution yet

1) The simplest is to replace the device shareset with a mono device. This will cause all downstream buses to mixdown to mono. The drawback here is that it doesn't provide much control over where the mixdown happens in the chain.

2) I want to try to perform re-panning using a speaker matrix callback, but haven't tried this yet. My thinking is that this could allow designers to pick out which buses they'd like to perform the downmix. It may also be a solution that allows us to pan left and right for those with partial hearing loss:

https://www.audiokinetic.com/library/2019.1.11_7296/?source=SDK&id=goingfurther_speakermatrixcallback.html