Expanding on why humans don’t do this (as often) the fleshy part of our ears is functional. Depending on how sound bounces in your brain can determine some additional features that it couldn’t just from two ears. If I recall correctly variation in ear shape between people also creates difficulty in creating identical universal 360 sound. Can’t help but find it fascinating we’ve had ray traced games for a bit now but sound is mostly still just faked and not simulated.
I literally waded through hundreds of HRTFs and didn’t find a single one that works, all are worse than panning/delay because there’s some nasty “nope this should be in the back, not front” discontinuity somewhere. Try for yourself, you might be more lucky. Best I can hope for is an app that lets me do photogrammetry on my ears to create a personalised one.
Regarding the sound that comes out of games though you can do a lot to be more realistic without getting HRTFs involved, the whole general theme of simulating the impact of geometry and textures on sound. Early 3d sound systems simply said “there’s an infinitely large room here, you can hang up speakers everywhere, say whether the room has reverb for that speaker or not, go nuts”, while newer stuff bounces audio waves off geometry so sound can be occluded, go multiple paths towards the two virtual microphones (your ears), and be influenced by the floor texture (say grass vs. tiles) differently. All that is about recreating real-world timbre, not so much 3d perception.
Basically the only thing that HRTFs do is enable up/down detection. Left/right is practically flawless with pan/delay, directly front/back is technically ambiguous but generally obvious from context.
Expanding on why humans don’t do this (as often) the fleshy part of our ears is functional. Depending on how sound bounces in your brain can determine some additional features that it couldn’t just from two ears. If I recall correctly variation in ear shape between people also creates difficulty in creating identical universal 360 sound. Can’t help but find it fascinating we’ve had ray traced games for a bit now but sound is mostly still just faked and not simulated.
I literally waded through hundreds of HRTFs and didn’t find a single one that works, all are worse than panning/delay because there’s some nasty “nope this should be in the back, not front” discontinuity somewhere. Try for yourself, you might be more lucky. Best I can hope for is an app that lets me do photogrammetry on my ears to create a personalised one.
Regarding the sound that comes out of games though you can do a lot to be more realistic without getting HRTFs involved, the whole general theme of simulating the impact of geometry and textures on sound. Early 3d sound systems simply said “there’s an infinitely large room here, you can hang up speakers everywhere, say whether the room has reverb for that speaker or not, go nuts”, while newer stuff bounces audio waves off geometry so sound can be occluded, go multiple paths towards the two virtual microphones (your ears), and be influenced by the floor texture (say grass vs. tiles) differently. All that is about recreating real-world timbre, not so much 3d perception.
Basically the only thing that HRTFs do is enable up/down detection. Left/right is practically flawless with pan/delay, directly front/back is technically ambiguous but generally obvious from context.