Virtual environment display for a 3D audio room simulation

William L. Chapin; Scott Foster

doi:10.1117/12.60436

30 June 1992 Virtual environment display for a 3D audio room simulation

William L. Chapin, Scott Foster

Proceedings Volume 1669, Stereoscopic Displays and Applications III; (1992) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.60436
Event: SPIE/IS&T 1992 Symposium on Electronic Imaging: Science and Technology, 1992, San Jose, CA, United States

Abstract

Recent developments in virtual 3D audio and synthetic aural environments have produced a complex acoustical room simulation. The acoustical simulation models a room with walls, ceiling, and floor of selected sound reflecting/absorbing characteristics and unlimited independent localizable sound sources. This non-visual acoustic simulation, implemented with 4 audio ConvolvotronsTM by Crystal River Engineering and coupled to the listener with a Poihemus IsotrakTM, tracking the listener's head position and orientation, and stereo headphones returning binaural sound, is quite compelling to most listeners with eyes closed. This immersive effect should be reinforced when properly integrated into a full, multi-sensory virtual environment presentation. This paper discusses the design of an interactive, visual virtual environment, complementing the acoustic model and specified to: 1) allow the listener to freely move about the space, a room of manipulable size, shape, and audio character, while interactively relocating the sound sources; 2) reinforce the listener's feeling of telepresence into the acoustical environment with visual and proprioceptive sensations; 3) enhance the audio with the graphic and interactive components, rather than overwhelm or reduce it; and 4) serve as a research testbed and technology transfer demonstration. The hardware/software design of two demonstration systems, one installed and one portable, are discussed through the development of four iterative configurations. The installed system implements a head-coupled, wide-angle, stereo-optic tracker/viewer and multi-computer simulation control. The portable demonstration system implements a head-mounted wide-angle, stereo-optic display, separate head and pointer electro-magnetic position trackers, a heterogeneous parallel graphics processing system, and object oriented C++ program code.

Citation Download Citation

William L. Chapin and Scott Foster "Virtual environment display for a 3D audio room simulation", Proc. SPIE 1669, Stereoscopic Displays and Applications III, (30 June 1992); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.60436

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