Audiovisual system design and content creation for immersive virtual environments with deployable panoramic display

Abstract

State-of-the-art schemata of immersive audiovisual system design mostly rely on in-situ stand-up construction with footings and rigid structural supports, an approach limited by low mobility and long set-up time. In this work, a new concept of audiovisual system design for a collaborative Immersive Virtual Environment with flexible and deployable projection elements and modular assemblies, is proposed. Drawing on stand-up configuration from Rensselaer’s Collaborative-Research Augmented Immersive Virtual Environment Laboratory (CRAIVE-Lab), a foundationless rectangular panoramic display with round corners is used, incorporating a motorized roll-up framework with mountable fillets. This set-up is then accompanied by a unitized 60-channel Wave Field Synthesis (WFS) linear loudspeaker array. The proposed audiovisual system calibrates the spatial audiovisual rendering by an integrated use of game-engine-based 3-D virtual environments (made in Unity and Unreal) and Max/MSP-based sonification utilities. In particular, an equirectangular transform is applied in virtual cameras and render textures to remove distortion effects from screen geometry. This transform is shared with the WFS array for a congruent presentation of audiovisual content.