Spatial audio becomes even more immersive in Android 15

Watching movies and TV shows on most Android phones provides a less immersive audio experience than most movie theaters. That’s because most mobile devices don’t have enough speakers in the right places to provide a true surround sound experience. The same is true for most headphones and wireless earbuds. Luckily, with compatible audio products like Pixel Buds Pro, there’s a trick you can use to create a more immersive listening experience. It’s called spatial audio, and it’s set to get even better in the upcoming Android 15 update.

While many movies and TV shows are recorded with multiple channels of audio, most headphones and wireless earbuds only play two stereo channels (left and right). This means that most audio from your phone sounds like it’s coming from right in front of you. To make the audio from your phone sound like it’s coming from all around you, you would typically need to install multiple speakers on your phone, which is physically impossible. This is where spatial audio comes in.

Spatial audio is a neat software trick that processes sound to create the illusion that sounds are coming from different directions. For example, if you’re watching a nature documentary and there’s a scene of a whale swimming in the ocean, you’ll hear the whale’s calls get stronger as it approaches and then fade as it swims away. Spatial audio offers a richer, more immersive mobile listening experience, especially when watching TV shows and movies, so many streaming services are promoting it.

To support spatial audio on Android, Google added an API in Android 13 that allows app developers to detect whether a phone is configured to support the feature. If it is configured, the platform will output spatialized audio when an app attempts to play spatializable content (typically 5.1+ channel audio). If it isn’t, it’s because the device manufacturer didn’t provide a spatialized audio effect that the platform can use to spatialize audio.

On the other hand, all wired and wireless audio devices can support at least the static variety of spatial audio, because with static spatial audio, sounds are fixed to the user and move with them – that is, no matter how you move your head, sounds coming from the left will always come from the left. On the other hand, with dynamic spatial audio, sounds are fixed to the environment and do not move with you – that is, if you turn your head to the left, sounds coming from the left will sound like they are coming from in front of you.

Dynamic spatial audio requires tracking of head position, so the connected headset must have a head tracking sensor. Additionally, enabling dynamic spatial audio requires the phone’s device manufacturer to configure the phone to use a very low latency Bluetooth audio codec. However, dynamic spatial audio can consume a lot of power, because the headset must process the audio very quickly and at the same time track the user’s head movements.

One way to reduce power consumption for dynamic spatial audio is to switch from Bluetooth Classic Audio to Bluetooth LE Audio, which transmits audio over the lower power Bluetooth Low Energy. Currently, Android doesn’t support dynamic spatial audio over Bluetooth LE Audio, but that will change in Android 15.

At the Google I/O developer conference last month, Google announced that Android 15 would enable support for dynamic spatial audio via LE Audio.

According to Karthic Veera, product manager for Android media and camera, this change not only means that dynamic spatial audio will become available as more products support LE Audio, but also means that LE Audio “will provide lower head tracking latency and improved bandwidth utilization for a more immersive experience.”

So as device makers switch to using Bluetooth LE Audio, we can expect Dynamic Spatial Audio to become even more immersive in Android 15, as latency and audio quality won’t have to be compromised as much to save battery life.