Why cant we use 2 audio listeners in one scene? Why the constraint?

So i was talking to a sound producer earlier and he showed me this cool effect he achieved using 2 microphones to emulate the left and right ears, it was like 3d but cooler.

Why cant we use 2 audio listeners to emulate the left and right ears to pick up sound in Unity?

And is there any method to bypass this constraint in unity?

And why is this even a constraint in the first place?

 

What your sound producer has shown you was probably a Binaural recording [1]. Using binaural Audio is possible in Unity3D and has nothing to do with the number of audio listeners. There are a couple of tools that enable HRTF (Head Related Transfer Function) processing on selected audio sources like Two Big Ears 3DCeption [2] for example. It also allows to decode B-Format recordings [3].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binaural_recording
[2] https://twobigears.com
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ambisonics

 

binuaral, is very interesting. I wonder if there are any open source plugins for this in unity?

 

Well, there's the Oculus Audio SDK .