Per-user voice channel volume dampening based on proximity in simulated room

Do you find yourself avoiding crowded voice channels?

If you've ever been in a voice channel with more than one conversation going at once, you know how frustrating it can be to communicate in an environment where everyone hears everyone else at the same volume. This is not how vocal communication works in the real world, as real-world conversations have a key element that Discord's voice communication system lacks: space.

The Crux: Space

With space, each conversational participant has the privilege of being nearer to the conversation they're interested in, and further away from the ones that they're less involved in, but which they don't want to shut out entirely. In a non-spatial voice communication landscape, having a social event that allows people to hop between conversations is nigh impossible (or extremely annoying for all parties involved, at best). The best options to achieve this effect currently available to Discord users are as follows:

• Moving the conversation to another voice channel: This eliminates the need for people to constantly be talking over each other, but subdivides the group's members in an unnatural way, often leading to continued unnecessary division due to both groups now being unaware of what's going on in the other.
• Locally adjusting the volume of each participant: While this gets closer to the desired effect, it is extremely cumbersome to do regularly, especially as groups get larger. Locally managing the volume of all participants also naturally leads to the user forgetting about these adjustments, and potentially being annoyed or confused when they next join a call and everyone is speaking at different volumes.
• Client modding: On top of being against the terms of service, this approach is unrealistic for more reasons than one. Although it would mostly achieve the desired effect (aside from server-side synchronization of relative participant distances), most people are unwilling to go through the trouble of using anything but the standard Discord client.
   

The Solution

My suggestion is to introduce a simple system in which participants of voice channels can position themselves within a virtual “room” (likely just a rectangular space where everyone's icons are visible according to their locations), so they can optimize the local relative volumes of all participants in the channel. The further a voice participant is from the client, the lower their volume is to the user. This simple feature would allow for some previously unfeasible use cases of Discord, for example:

• Two (or more) sub-groups of people within a call having their own conversations at opposite sides of the “room,” which individual members of each group can choose to hop between based on their interest in each group's topic.
• A person who isn't interested in directly participating in the main conversation, but who wants some soft conversational background noise. They can choose to jump in or out at any time by moving themselves closer to the group or groups, all without having to individually re-balance local audio levels for each member.
• Programmatic control over user locations in the “room” via bots with specialized privileges, allowing for 3rd-party apps to mediate proximity voice chat for games using Discord.

In short, I believe adding a system to position voice channel participants relative to one another in a simulated space would be a fantastic addition to Discord. It would increase the flexibility of single voice channels, accommodate accessibility for users with nonstandard needs, allow for a broader variety of uses cases of the platform in general, and put Discord at the top of the market for immersive voice communication systems for friend groups and communities alike.

Thank you for reading, and I hope this suggestion can spark conversation about bringing something like this into reality!