An exploration of virtual 3-D sound

Abstract

Many of the applications, virtual environments, and video games available to average computer users embrace stunning 3‐D graphics and real‐world visualizations. Developers spend an extraordinary amount of time and effort creating these immersive, realistic virtual environments, primarily focusing on the graphics components. Within these virtual realities, the user should be able to easily and accurately perceive the locations of sound sources, as well as the acoustic nature of the environment. However, for reasons of economy and simplicity, most developers apply readily available industry standards for generating pseudo‐3‐D sounds in their applications. This research explores the shortcomings of these standards and proposes an effective alternative. This project includes a number of computationally efficient, physics‐based 3‐D acoustics simulations, each of which will produce realistic aural reproductions. The goal is to evaluate and compare these algorithms against each other, non‐3‐D sound reproduction, and the current industry standards (e.g. Microsoft’s DirectX’s pseudo‐3‐D algorithm). Two hypotheses will be tested. First, users will find true, physics‐based 3‐D algorithms to render improved auralization reproductions compared against DirectX and/or OpenAL. Second, localization and spatialization improve with user training when using these algorithms.