I wonder if they have looked into air curtains. Commercial installations are at a point where you have this silent, completely invisible sheet of fast-moving air that provides some degree of noise isolation as well - maybe four walls of these + a floating ceiling is enough when coupled with the noise-cancelling headphones.
It's not going to make it any worse. They just need to reduce noise levels enough to make the noise cancellation more effective, so they could keep the open booth + headphone setup instead of a soundbooth.
They also add some pink noise from the air and motors which might help.
In any case, just an idea, data on their effectiveness seems hard to find.
That would encourage a much more boring style of gameplay.
If you can’t launch a surprise attack because the audience will give it away, the best strategy would be to slowly and incrementally build up a gold and experience advantage.
There was once a big StarCraft 2 tournament where one of the contestants walked out mid-event because he couldn't pull off any cheeky tricks due to the audience giving him away.
Think of it this way: any time the audience starts going wild about something one team knows about but the other doesn't, they're doing so in anticipation of dramatic moment when the other team learns what happened and must adapt while the first time is trying to exploit it.
If it's given away instead, the anticipated event never happens or is muted because the enemy is not caught off guard.
There was a recent dota2 LAN without soundproofing and the audience would ruin surprise attacks (aka smoke tanks) or surprise objective taking (aka rosh), it made the gameplay worse.
In Age of Empires tournaments, they simply put the players in a different room from the casters/audience, with live streaming cameras. Maybe because live audiences are relatively rare in these tournaments, there's less of a demand for players to be physically in the same room as the audience?
You may be thinking of pre twitch/YouTube. These players sell out coliseums for $100s of dollars per ticket. The fans want to at least physically see them play, even if it’s through a window. once you rely on webcams then you may as well be watching on twitch for free.
The former Westinghouse Electric Sharon Transformer Plant is a 58-acre facility located in Mercer County, Pennsylvania. They built substation transformers there. To test them the rolled them into a sound proof room, on a rail car, to listen for hum. Lose windings would vibrate causing hum and generate damaging heat. When I was there I was told that if wanted to rent it, they would fix the 440V door system (someone took the cooper).
To give you a size perspective of this place, our tour guide, from the balcony, said "See that toy truck down there? That is a full size 18-wheeler." It took us a 20 minute walk to reach that full size truck that looked like a child's toy in this MASSIVE room.
Sorry, but what's this showing? Someone walks with paper in their hands, that's what you're referring to, but did this have an effect in some way that was noticeable later in the tournament that isn't shown in the clip?
It seems like a joke to bring a stack of papers to a computer tournament, not something to trick the other team into thinking... what, exactly?
context: at Ti8's final, Team LGD played against Team OG. During the draft phase, OG players had some paper, which were statistics of LGD (I guess).
Somnus the player said: Ceb is holding a bunch of paper. https://youtu.be/abEDXaPyIOE?t=15.
In that final, LGD almost won but they lost at the end. That final is arguably the best final in Dota2 history.
The moment when Somuns taunted OG was captured by True Sight, which is a documentary for every TI final. LGD players surely watched the documentary or at least the clip many times.
The first clip you questioned about is from Ti9, a year after Ti8, where OG and LGD played again.
Notail the player took a bunch of paper (way too many for drafting analysis purpose) to remind LGD their tragic loss last year.
Hence the mind game. Btw, LGD lost again.
This is a common consumer product, "gas fill" multi-pane windows. Argon is used in this application because it's not very thermally conductive (it's also used to fill dry suits for the same reason). I found a pretty good "sciencey layman" explanation of "why Argon" for dry suits here, which matches the reasoning for windows: https://www.decompression.org/maiken/Why_Argon.htm .
I'm not sure how much this carries through to sound transmission and I couldn't find a lot of good literature about it. I'd have loved to see if they did any quantitive testing. It makes sense that Argon would reduce sound transmission some, but I would expect that the properties of the glass sheet itself and the interface between the panes and the frame would be more of an issue than the void between the panes.
The insulation part has a nice handwaving explanation [1]:
Heat is transmitted because gas molecules bounce back and forth in a box, picking up energy on the hot side and leaving it on the cold side. The kinetic energy in any gas molecule is proportional to the temperature, and is
E = 1/2 m * v^2
solved for v:
v = sqrt[ (2 * E) / m ]
Faster gas means faster transmission, so the rate is proportional to 1 / sqrt(m).
I don't have a good intuitive explanation for the sound attenuation. The acoustic impedance for an ideal gas is going to depend on the mass of the molecules, and having very different acoustic impedance for the two gasses at an interface will minimize transmission. So I would expect Argon to reflect more sound, but I don't have as cute an explanation as the one for thermal transmission.
[1] Also completely made up, would love to know if I'm wrong.
Argon is commonly used for double glazed windows so I would assume that the manufacturer has the experience to do that. Vacuum insulated panels exist but since that is for insulating properties I don't know if there would be any advantage for sound deadening.
A bit off topic. But this site is auto translated? Its in Dutch for me and reads like a llm translated piece of text. Very unpleasant to read with overly long sentences and weird expressions.
It looks that way, yeah. It’s fine in English, but their “select languages” list has about 30 different languages listed, and I can’t imagine they’ve spent the money to do that the right way.
Valve uses volunteers for the majority of translation work. Some languages are lucky to have competent and committed volunteer translators, others not so much.
Another small northern European language here that got an (hopefully) auto-translated version. Completely unreadable. Even if done by a human it is pretty much translated word for word with no feeling for the target language at all.
Could you delay the large screens, commentaries, and live broadcast by 3-5 seconds (or more) such that any information gained from leaked noise would have minimal impact to the players? This would make ANS headphones viable
5sec would be way too low for anything meaningful. One of the more pronounced cases, where the audience reacts, is 'smoke' which makes the players invisible until they are close to opponent player (or tower), used in a way to initiated a gank. The 'smoke' last 45seconds. Killing a big NPC (Roshan) is another example as it takes time (and usually more than a single player) to down it. Other cases: buying a rapier - very high damaging and expensive item but it does drop on death - so it's a warning sound, that may take minutes between a conflict and used.
Sound proofing however still doesn't solve the issue as it doesn't deal with the vibrations in the venue. Pro players have commented that if they start feeling vibrations while 'farming' alone, they become more cautious - asking a support player to cover the gank or move to a safer area.
Riot tried this with League of Legends and the result was that you'd get players jumping up celebrating 30 seconds before the audience saw the nexus falling, which was incredibly anti-climactic.
Imagine if you were watching tennis and halfway through match point you suddenly see the player celebrating.
To be fair, most of the time it's GG well before the nexus actually falls, but it's sometimes meaningful, and it still ruins the moment to have that sudden de-sync effect as you see live players reactions before you see why on screen.
As a result, as far as I know Riot abandonned having any meaningful and deliberate delay (There's still some technical delay natural to broadcasting).
This was an entirely weird thing at the last soccer world cup, or the one before that: TV via Satellite, Video streams and TV via DVB-T had different transmission delays, with up to 15 - 20 seconds of delay between them. As such, the people across the street started cheering first, then the goal would show on our screen and a bit after that the people across from the balcony out back started cheering.
No, as another comment said this doesn't work in Dota 2, sometimes it can take 15-30 seconds of gathering before you trigger an action. And if you know X hero is in the fog of war you can easily gain an advantage. Or if you know X hero is jungling or stacking creeps or what not. There is just too much information you can gather from being able to see the enemy.
If you haven't been paying attention to the eSports scene it can definitely be really surprising, but the crowd size and the production value of these things is insane to think about, especially if you aren't expecting it for just a video game.
Readit News
They also add some pink noise from the air and motors which might help.
In any case, just an idea, data on their effectiveness seems hard to find.
If you can’t launch a surprise attack because the audience will give it away, the best strategy would be to slowly and incrementally build up a gold and experience advantage.
Think of it this way: any time the audience starts going wild about something one team knows about but the other doesn't, they're doing so in anticipation of dramatic moment when the other team learns what happened and must adapt while the first time is trying to exploit it.
If it's given away instead, the anticipated event never happens or is muted because the enemy is not caught off guard.
To give you a size perspective of this place, our tour guide, from the balcony, said "See that toy truck down there? That is a full size 18-wheeler." It took us a 20 minute walk to reach that full size truck that looked like a child's toy in this MASSIVE room.
Here is the Worlds Quiets Room, as of 2018:
https://www.soundacousticsolutions.com/blog/2018/04/05/the-q...
It seems like a joke to bring a stack of papers to a computer tournament, not something to trick the other team into thinking... what, exactly?
The first clip you questioned about is from Ti9, a year after Ti8, where OG and LGD played again. Notail the player took a bunch of paper (way too many for drafting analysis purpose) to remind LGD their tragic loss last year. Hence the mind game. Btw, LGD lost again.
Deleted Comment
I'm not sure how much this carries through to sound transmission and I couldn't find a lot of good literature about it. I'd have loved to see if they did any quantitive testing. It makes sense that Argon would reduce sound transmission some, but I would expect that the properties of the glass sheet itself and the interface between the panes and the frame would be more of an issue than the void between the panes.
Heat is transmitted because gas molecules bounce back and forth in a box, picking up energy on the hot side and leaving it on the cold side. The kinetic energy in any gas molecule is proportional to the temperature, and is
E = 1/2 m * v^2
solved for v:
v = sqrt[ (2 * E) / m ]
Faster gas means faster transmission, so the rate is proportional to 1 / sqrt(m).
I don't have a good intuitive explanation for the sound attenuation. The acoustic impedance for an ideal gas is going to depend on the mass of the molecules, and having very different acoustic impedance for the two gasses at an interface will minimize transmission. So I would expect Argon to reflect more sound, but I don't have as cute an explanation as the one for thermal transmission.
[1] Also completely made up, would love to know if I'm wrong.
That's a different kinda spectator sport.
Sound proofing however still doesn't solve the issue as it doesn't deal with the vibrations in the venue. Pro players have commented that if they start feeling vibrations while 'farming' alone, they become more cautious - asking a support player to cover the gank or move to a safer area.
Riot tried this with League of Legends and the result was that you'd get players jumping up celebrating 30 seconds before the audience saw the nexus falling, which was incredibly anti-climactic.
Imagine if you were watching tennis and halfway through match point you suddenly see the player celebrating.
To be fair, most of the time it's GG well before the nexus actually falls, but it's sometimes meaningful, and it still ruins the moment to have that sudden de-sync effect as you see live players reactions before you see why on screen.
As a result, as far as I know Riot abandonned having any meaningful and deliberate delay (There's still some technical delay natural to broadcasting).
that's a packed stadium, up to the nose bleeds
If you haven't been paying attention to the eSports scene it can definitely be really surprising, but the crowd size and the production value of these things is insane to think about, especially if you aren't expecting it for just a video game.
Deleted Comment