I used to use panning back when I played WoW "seriously" and did 25 man raids, it makes hectic audio chat sooo much more clear. Some gaming voice apps can dynamically pan voices in 3D to match where the characters are, but I didn't use any of that. Just simply putting Guild Leader center, Tanks ~25% right, Healers ~25% left, and then randomly throwing everyone else somewhere wider in the stereo field. It sounds like an actual group of people rather than a single overlapping mono mess.

A podcast I listen to with 4-5 people talking in a room does that with its audio. It sounds like a good idea, but in practice, it drives me nuts and makes me feel like I have plugged ears. I always enable mono audio when I listen to it.

I think if it was dynamic, where turning my head towards the person speaking balanced the audio (like in real life), I would not have a problem with it. A super simple form of virtual reality that would only require a simple head-mounted gyroscope or motion sensor.

Another podcast I listen to has two people with very similar voices, and I sometimes have a hard time figuring out who's speaking, so I welcome any advancements in this space.

Haven’t they messed up positioning, and reduced the volume too much on the further ear side?

i hope product managers of ms teams/zoom/meets are reading this thread, this is pure gold right here

How did you set this up?

It was built into whichever voice-chat software we were using, just a simple right-click action. This was a long time ago, so I don't totally remember, probably 2008-2012 or so? Trying to jog my memory with Google and I think it was TeamSpeak and the "3D Sound" feature. I feel like Mumble may also have been able to do this.

That's a really cool idea, thanks for the heads up. Didn't realize it was possible but man would it make a world of difference in meetings.

I dream of the day when our laptops come with an integrated microphone array with automatic beamforming based on head tracking.

I mean, automatic beamforming microphones are actually fairly common now, in laptops. Head tracking is probably a detour if your goal is just to get good clear voice input.

Some HP laptops have this and it’s terrible. Perhaps it would be useful if it selected the right sound 100% of the time but in reality all you get is audio cutting all the time with no explanation.