octaphonic project ambitions and binaural workarounds

Hey there lovely community.

I have this project in my head to create a digital audio piece and/or framework that uses an octophonic sound setup. I basically want to create a piece that relies heavily upon the perception of a sound's space being anywhere in a room and moving from one place in a room to another.

problem is, i don't have an octophonic setup nor do i have easy access to one. There is one at the university, but that space is (and should be) a priority for the student body (i'm on staff). When I asked the question of if it was possible to simulate that sort of environment without buying my own setup, someone got me onto binaural setups.

When i was first looking into it, i thought "awesome. i can write the piece using a binaural setup and then just transfer that to octophonic once i have access to an octophonic space." but the more research i do on it, the less i'm convinced this is the way to go because of how the setup for binaural would be so vastly different than the setup for octophonic - i'm getting the impression that if i do the work to spatialize the piece binaurally, that has no practical translation to octophonic - i'd have to respatialize the piece "from scratch" as it were in octophonic, which makes the binaural part of it seem like a waste of time.

Does this seem like an accurate assessment? If so, can anyone recommend any alternatives? You're also free to tell me that writing an octophonic piece is a stupid idea, and i should do surround sound instead or something. I'm in very initial stages of this conceptually and it's the first time i'm trying this, so i acknowledge that the whole thing could be very ill-conceived.

Thanks!