ICAD 2007, Day 1 extra
Another item from Day 1 that I forgot to mention in the previous post - the poster presentation titled “USER-SPECIFIC AUDIO RENDERING AND STEERABLE SOUND FOR DISTRIBUTED VIRTUAL ENVIRONMENTS”, by Mike Wozniewski, Zack Settel and Jeremy R. Cooperstock.
This work created a 3d-game like graphical environment with visible objects that also represent auditory sources and sinks. The result is kind of like a cross between Second Life and Native Instruments’ Reaktor, or some other audio processing patcher software. The user can take a first-person or second-person perspective of a world that contains sounding objects, other users, and sound-modifying objects. For example, the demonstrator wore a microphone headset that fed audio into the environment (which itself contained virtual objects that generated spatial audio), and was able to effect his voice by aiming a wireframe, cone-shaped sound radiation pattern towards the effector objects - such as a flanger. Other sounding objects contained sound loops that could be similarly triggered by the viewer’s site lines. Overall, the environment enabled an enjoyable, playful collaborative, networked, immersive experimental audio experience. Nice work. Here’s a quote from the paper abstract:
We present a method for user-specific audio rendering of a virtual environment that is shared by multiple participants. … Spatialization of sound sources is accomplished via acoustic physical modelling, yet our approach also allows for localized signal processing within the scene. In order to control the flow of sound within the scene, the user has the ability to steer audio in specific directions. This paradigm leads to many novel applications where groups of individuals can share one continuous interactive sonic space.
And an image from the paper:
On a separate note, Somaya Langley has an ICAD photoset on her Flickr account (hopefully not censored!), including the photo below of a slide showing the geodesic head-cage for HRTF capture via reciprocity technique from a paper I mentioned on the previous post.
