3. Game Audio

To make “Roll A Ball - Holographic” a little less quiet, audio clips were added to the project. The initial approach involved following “Chapter 5 - Spatial Sound” of the “Holograms 101” tutorial to specify the settings for playing audio in the HoloLens. Background music and sound effects for picking up the rotating yellow cubes were the chosen areas of audio for the project. The recommended spatial sound settings were applied, however, it was found that the game audio was really quiet when the project was ran in the HoloLens. Tweaking the spatial sound settings was the next step into remedying audio issue. There was a setting for Volume for the audio clips in Unity and it was verified that the value was set to the maximum (at 1). After numerous unsuccessful attempts to remedy the issue by tweaking the spatial sound settings, a different approach was taken.
The two audio clips were reimported (removed from the Scene the re-added) in the project and the their default settings was maintained. Rebuilding the project with these settings and running it on the HoloLens resolved the low volume issue. It turns out that playing the game audio at their original 2D setting instead of modifying the audio to become 3D allows the audio to played at a constant and expected audible volume. Spatial sound gives sounds a specific location in 3D space. Because the user does not need to move/walk around in “Roll A Ball - Holographic”, spatial sound settings were not needed.

Figure 2. Code snippets of audio related code in the PlayerController script for playing a sound effect when a rotating yellow cube is picked up.