O3A Beamer

Host Support

Host Type	Support
AAX	Yes
VST2	Yes

Audio

	Channels	Content
Input	16	O3A
Output	1	Mono

Controls

Azimuth
Elevation
Sharpness

Description

The O3A Beamer extracts sound in a particular "beam" direction from a 3D O3A mix. You can think of this as a narrow directional microphone response, pointed in a particular direction in the soundfield.

The beam direction can be set using the azimuth and elevation controls, or the control surface, where the direction is indicated by the crosshairs.

There are labels on the control surface to help you find left, right, above etc. However, if this still does not make any sense, you might want to see our page on the O3A Visualiser which lays out its viewing region in the same way.

The algorithm used is a "passive" one and should not colour frequency content significantly.

If you are interested in producing simple virtual microphone responses from an O3A mix, you may also wish to read about the O3A Virtual Microphone.

The plugin is available in the O3A Core plugin library.

View Support

When used with O3A View Sync from the O3A View library, this plugin can be connected to the separate View or ViewVR applications.

When this option is available, a 'View' button appears at the top right of the plugin's user interface.

When this is pressed, the plugin is connected to the View or ViewVR application and is displayed there.

View Support	ViewVR Support
The current direction is shown using a cross. Hold the left mouse button to set the azimuth and elevation.	The current direction is shown using a beam and cross. Hold a VR controller trigger to set the azimuth and elevation.

View Support

ViewVR Support

The current direction is shown using a cross.

Hold the left mouse button to set the azimuth and elevation.

The current direction is shown using a beam and cross.

Hold a VR controller trigger to set the azimuth and elevation.

Controls

Controls: Azimuth and Elevation

Azimuth and Elevation control the direction to extracted.

Azimuth is the horizontal angle, between -180 to +180 degrees, measured anticlockwise (left) from the front. Elevation is a vertical angle between -90 and +90 degrees, measured with positive upwards and 0 on the horizontal.

For instance, the direction for azimuth +90 and elevation +45 can be found by turning 90 degrees to the left and then looking up by 45 degrees.

Control: Sharpness

The sharpness control determines how directional the beam response is. A value of zero reduces the response to an omnidirectional one like that of the mono decoder. A value of one is the usual case and gives the sharpest response.

O3A Core