Do you mean for your studio’s business? because if this is Steinberg’s view I think I will have to move on. If you mean your own business, ignoring this might be foolish.
VR Will Be A $38 Billion Industry By 2026
Wild figures, pulled out of thin air, but, the commitment to this technology is real, all the big hitters are pouring money into it, and that’s what decides whether this should be viewed seriously or not, calling it hype is shortsighted.
How Microsoft wants to dominate virtual reality
Intel Acquires Voke VR Startup As It Moves Into Immersive Sports
Imax Completes Round Of Virtual Reality Funding
Facebook’s CTO on why he’s betting big on AI, VR
Why The Next Decade For Gaming Will Be Anything But Casual
etc. etc.
virtual/augmented reality products will be designed, produced, and project managed by humans. VR audio assets will have to be produced by humans. Immersive audio environments will have to be created by humans. Convincing audio spatialisation requires mixing and auditioning by humans. More roles, potentially, means more jobs.
I’ve been working in the games industry for over 20 years, and VR is an interesting proposition; but it is true that it is still early days; I think we’re at the stage of ‘format wars’ where after a while, the dominant player will emerge with a couple of other platforms surrounding it; that’s how its often been with consoles as well.
But the technology, though it is improving leaps and bounds is still in its infancy.
I’ve had the chance to try out the Oculus, Morhpheus and Vive and the potential is fantastic; I just wasn’t sure whether the hardware was quite up to it yet (still all fairly low-res).
The other issue is that it requires a shift in game design, that (from people I’ve worked with) will take some time to master; how to best deal with the new interactivity, nausea, movement.
Everybody’s trying to come up with the game or app that will be a platform seller, and I’m not sure it’s there yet, but we’ll see…
What I’m interested in to know is what people feel they need in their tool set.
Some of the game audio will be spatialized in real-time, and so creation-wise would be done (imho) in the usual way.
Other stuff will be ‘pre-baked’ with hrtf processing or, as Tronic suggests, Ambisonics.
But what are the other features that people need?
We have quite recently started working on high profile VR projects at Yellow Cab. One of the big ones was an Assassins Creed VR trailer for Ubisoft.
Quite frustrating for the moment as it’s a mess player-wise with a few different formats available, and Nuendo not being up to par bus-wise to handle higher order Ambisonic which is (for now) the best way of getting a decent result down the line when converting to binaural.
We are actively investigating solutions, but for AC we turned to mixing in Pyramix, which is a whole world of pain in itself.
Pretty sure at NAB 2017 we will see a lot of substantive progress and product reveals in VR Audio and Video. There was some at NAB 2016 but the audio piece had not been cracked at that point, at least in terms of immersive audio that follows your movements in a VR environment.
Because we had a very experienced Pyramix operator available, whereas with Reaper we would have had to stumble through the dark quite a bit before we got the result we wanted.
Ok, thanks 
Just seen, this announcement looks like an interesting development…
Will be keeping an eye out for that for sure. Thanks
Europe’s virtual reality sector has grown to nearly 300 companies…
When will we see Steinberg in the ‘3D Tools - Audio’ group?
What about the new dearVR plugin? Doesn’t this mean most of the work of getting Cubase into the VR space is already done? (Just need a wider bus for SOA/TOA export.)