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Though this may be a bit of old news for gamers, the Nintendo Wii makes use of what is called a "depth of sound" effect. Okay, we've heard of "depth of field" where the words three dimensions, photography techniques and realism come in. Depth of sound is the "next step" (well not really the next step, but it does sound cool) in audio realism for simulations.

The Wii controller comes with a built in speaker that transmits sound coming from a "source" which is the controller. So let us say if you're in a fishing simulation, casting the reel will cause sound to emit from your controller and slowly transmit to the speaker of your TV set to simulate the travelling sound. Pretty neat?

Now I don't know exactly how this will translate to the real world use, but since most VR simulations make use of computer games as a source of technology, we'll be seeing this depth of sound concept introduced in research and development fields, especially for training and medicine.