3D sound in the telepresence project BEAMING

The involvement of Aalborg University in the EU project BEAMING will be presented. BEAMING deals with telepresence including multiple modalities; vision, haptics and audio, of which the latter is of main interest here. The setup consists of two types of locations: The Destination, where the Locals reside, and the Transporter, where the Visitor resides. The Visitors will virtually visit the Locals through an Internet connection and both must feel the other party being physically present. All Locals wear close-up microphones and their positions are tracked. In order to support presence for the Visitor, 3D audio is provided through headphones. It is rendered based on the Locals' coordinates via a common Internet database including local positional tracking to ensure that information on the Visitor's head rotation has a minimum delay through the network. The BEAMING project currently addresses three applications: A general purpose theatrical scene, a teaching situation and a medical patient-visiting-doctor scenario. The March 2012 project review deals with the teaching situation. This involves a single microphone recording followed by signal processing that reconstructs the spatial content. The Visitor is represented as a robot with a loudspeaker.