VisiSonics

VisiSonics
Information
Industry	Spatial audio, acoustic measurement and visualization
Founded	2009
Founder	Ramani Duraiswami, Adam O'Donovan
Headquarters	Riverdale Park, Maryland, United States
Notable Personnel	Ramani Duraiswami (co-founder), Adam O'Donovan (CEO and co-founder)
Products	RealSpace 3D Audio (sold to CEVA in 2023), 5/64 Audio Visual Camera, Planar Array, Portable Acoustic Camera, VisiSonics Digital Array Microphone (VDAM)
Website	https://visisonics.com

VisiSonics (VisiSonics Corporation) is an American audio technology company spun out of the University of Maryland, College Park. It developed the RealSpace 3D Audio engine, which renders 3D audio over ordinary stereo headphones using head-related transfer functions (HRTFs), and it makes spherical and planar microphone arrays for acoustic measurement. The company dates its founding to 2009, when Ramani Duraiswami and Adam O'Donovan started it from research in Duraiswami's Perceptual Interfaces and Reality Laboratory.

In 2014 Oculus VR licensed RealSpace 3D Audio, and the deal was announced at Oculus Connect 1, the company's first developer conference. Oculus CEO Brendan Iribe said in January 2015 that the company had taken a snapshot of the licensed implementation and was building it into an Oculus audio SDK. Meta's current spatial audio toolkit, the Meta XR Audio SDK, replaced the later Oculus Spatializer plugin. In May 2023 VisiSonics sold the RealSpace business, its technology, patents and spatial audio research team to CEVA, Inc. As of October 2026 VisiSonics describes RealSpace as "wholly owned technology of CEVA Inc." and markets its acoustic camera and microphone array products.

Reviewed 21 October 2026. Every claim checked against the cited PR Newswire, Road to VR, MCV, Voices of VR, Diamondback, BBJ, USM, Maryland Today, audioXpress, Ceva and VisiSonics pages, the JASA paper, UMD report and patent record. About review dates.

History

University research

The company's technology came out of spatial audio research at the University of Maryland. In a 2015 interview with MCV, the company traced the work to projects by Duraiswami and other scientists that included virtual audio for conference calls and a project to help newly blinded soldiers cross streets by relying on their hearing. VisiSonics lead software developer Rod Haxton told the Voices of VR podcast in April 2015 that the work had originally been funded by the Department of Defense to help nearly blinded soldiers find their way.

Two lines of research fed the company's products. One was fast measurement of an individual's HRTF. In a 2006 paper in The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, Dmitry Zotkin, Duraiswami, Elena Grassi and Nail Gumerov described applying acoustic reciprocity: a miniature speaker is placed in the subject's ear and microphones surround the subject, so HRTFs for all microphone positions are recorded at the same time. The other was spherical microphone arrays for capturing a sound field. A 2008 University of Maryland technical report by O'Donovan, Zotkin and Duraiswami described a 32-microphone spherical array with built-in preamplifiers, filters and a USB interface for spatial audio capture and reproduction. A University of Maryland patent on an "audio camera" built from microphone arrays, naming Duraiswami, O'Donovan and Gumerov as inventors, was filed in July 2012, claiming a 2007 priority date, and granted in July 2017; Google Patents lists it as expired for non-payment of fees.

Founding

VisiSonics says O'Donovan founded the company with Duraiswami in 2009. The University of Maryland's news site likewise dates the spin-out to 2009. A November 2020 University System of Maryland announcement said the company launched in 2011, and a 2016 Baltimore Business Journal report said the company had officially spun off from the university in 2012 and had grown to eight employees. Haxton named Duraiswami, Zotkin and O'Donovan as the founders in 2015. The university's Office of Technology Commercialization helped set the company up, according to a 2014 report in the student newspaper The Diamondback. Road to VR reported in 2014 that VisiSonics held exclusive licensing rights to technology developed on campus.

The University System of Maryland's 2020 announcement said the technology was first developed at the university with 6 million US dollars in National Science Foundation and DARPA funding, and that the company held exclusive licenses to six university patents. In 2014 its products included the RealSpace 3D Audio software engine and the RealSpace Audio Panoramic Camera.

Oculus license (2014)

Duraiswami told the Baltimore Business Journal that the deal began when the company showed Oculus its demo at the Game Developers Conference, before Facebook bought Oculus. Haxton recalled that at GDC 2014 VisiSonics executive Gregg Wilkes got Iribe to listen to the demo, Iribe brought over Palmer Luckey, and negotiations followed. Oculus announced the license at Oculus Connect in Los Angeles in September 2014, alongside the Crescent Bay prototype, the first Rift prototype with integrated headphones. On stage, Iribe said Oculus had "licensed RealSpace 3D's audio technology, a high fidelity VR audio system developed over 10 years". VisiSonics' release quoted him as saying "Audio is an essential ingredient for immersive virtual reality." The Diamondback reported that VisiSonics would use the licensing money to develop its technology further for virtual reality. In 2016 Duraiswami said he could not discuss the specifics of the deal.

Road to VR noted that the licensed technology was not yet used in the Oculus demos shown at Connect. At CES in January 2015 Iribe told the site that Oculus had taken a snapshot of the RealSpace implementation and was building it into an Oculus Audio SDK for the Oculus Rift DK2 and Samsung Gear VR. Haxton later described Oculus as taking the low-level engine and wrapping its own SDK around it. When the consumer Oculus Rift went on sale in March 2016, the Baltimore Business Journal described VisiSonics' technology as licensed by Oculus and part of the headset.

Funding and later licensing (2015-2022)

In January 2015 MCV identified Wilkes as VisiSonics' interim CEO and executive vice president, and Duraiswami as founder and president. According to the University System of Maryland, the founders took over management of the company in 2017. In November 2020 the system's Momentum Fund invested 500,000 US dollars in the then College Park-based company. The fund said the investment completed a financing round of 3.5 million US dollars led by an audio company with ties to the music, cinema and gaming markets; Duraiswami was named as founder and CEO.

The company then licensed RealSpace outside VR. In October 2021 it announced a partnership with Andrea Systems, an aviation communications supplier in Farmingdale, New York, which was building RealSpace into a 3D audio conversion kit for military aircraft communication systems. At CES 2022 it showed HRTF personalization from a few smartphone photos of a user's head, as well as technology that measures and adjusts to a listener's hearing, developed with University of Maryland hearing and speech researchers. Maryland Today listed Tesla, SpaceX, Oculus, Ford, BMW and Andrea Systems among the company's customers. In April 2022 THX Ltd. said it had licensed VisiSonics 3D audio and personalization technology for THX Spatial Audio tools for game developers and music producers, game-engine plug-ins and personal HRTF tools for headset makers. In January 2023 the company said RealSpace was used in boAt's Nirvana Eutopia, the Indian brand's first headphones with head tracking, launched in partnership with CEVA.

Sale of RealSpace to CEVA (2023)

On 10 May 2023 CEVA, Inc. announced that it had acquired the RealSpace 3D Spatial Audio business, technology and patents from VisiSonics Corporation, together with the Maryland-based spatial audio R&D team. CEVA said it would combine RealSpace with its MotionEngine sensor fusion software for head tracking and offer it to makers of earbuds, hearables, gaming headsets, AR/VR devices and automotive systems. In the announcement Duraiswami, named as founder and CEO of VisiSonics, said CEVA was "the right company to take our technology forward". As of October 2026 Ceva sells the software as Ceva-RealSpace, in a Personal variant for earbuds and headphones and an Elevate variant for Android and Windows hosts, and lists XR headsets among its targets.

VisiSonics kept its acoustic measurement business. Its leadership page lists O'Donovan as CEO and co-founder and Duraiswami as co-founder; Duraiswami is also a professor of computer science at the University of Maryland. The company's listed address is in Riverdale Park, Maryland.

Products

Product	Type	Details
RealSpace 3D Audio	Spatial audio rendering software	HRTF-based rendering with room models and head tracking over stereo headphones; sold to CEVA in 2023, now Ceva-RealSpace
5/64 Audio Visual Camera	Spherical microphone array	64 microphones and 5 HD video cameras on an aluminum sphere; acoustic images from 200 Hz to 7000 Hz; optional VR and ambisonics modules
Planar Array	Planar microphone array	64 microphones for one-direction recordings; acoustic images from 400 Hz to 12 kHz
Portable Acoustic Camera	Portable microphone array	Battery-powered array with built-in noise, vibration and harshness (NVH) analysis and a touch interface
VisiSonics Digital Array Microphone (VDAM)	Digital microphone modules	Chainable microphones with analog-to-digital conversion at the capsule, USB output and up to 48 kHz sampling at 24 bits; used in academic arrays

The acoustic cameras use VisiSonics' FINDr software and are aimed at noise source identification. The company says they are used by car makers, research institutions and the military. Its leadership page names Tesla, Ford and Subaru as partners on the measurement side.

XR work

RealSpace 3D Audio for VR

VisiSonics' 2014 release said RealSpace could place sound anywhere in 3D space and convey direction, distance, depth and movement through standard stereo headphones. It modeled how sound changes between a source and the listener's ears using HRTFs, room models and head tracking. The company published two downloadable demos in 2014, one of them a DK2 version of the Oculus Tuscany Demo with sound sources placed around the villa. Road to VR's Paul James wrote that the Tuscany demo "genuinely set a new benchmark for me", while calling its presentation heavy-handed. In December 2014 Iris VR's Technolust demo "A Way Out" used RealSpace for positional audio.

For developers the company released a Unity plug-in, first as a free beta for Unity Pro users, and a Wwise plug-in. In January 2015 an FMOD Studio plug-in was nearly finished and an Unreal Engine plug-in was in development. In April 2015 VisiSonics released version 0.9.10 with Unity 5 support. Haxton said that Unreal Engine 4 integration through Wwise was in beta, and that the engine modeled a shoebox-shaped virtual room whose wall, floor and ceiling materials changed the sound. He estimated the cost at about 2 percent of CPU per sound source.

Personalized HRTFs

VisiSonics told MCV in 2015 that it had patented a method to capture an individual's HRTF in seconds rather than hours, and that it had built a large HRTF library. Haxton described the capture as taking about 15 minutes, compared with two to three hours for conventional measurement, with speakers in the ears and microphones around the listener, the reciprocal arrangement from the 2006 paper. By 2022 the company was offering personalization from smartphone photos of a user's head.

Audio capture for 360 video

The Audio Panoramic Camera was described in 2014 as an 8-inch sphere with 64 microphones and 5 cameras for recording panoramic video with matching sound. Haxton said it could beamform toward a chosen area and visualize sound reflections, and that a Pro Tools plug-in for editing 3D sound into captured footage was in development. VisiSonics' current 5/64 Audio Visual Camera also combines 5 video cameras with 64 microphones on a sphere, and it offers an optional virtual reality module and an Ambisonics module that extracts a full-sphere surround format.

See also

• 3D audio
• Head-related transfer function
• Meta XR Audio SDK
• VisiSonics RealSpace Experience Player
• Steam Audio