Development of 3D surround sound software facililties for Virtual Reality / Udvikling af 3D surround sound softwarefaciliteter til Virtual Reality

This project was started as a part of the 3D Visual Data Mining project with the purpose of investigating possibilities for using sound as an additional tool for Data Mining. Generated sound can relate to additional statistical properties of the visualised statistical observations (objects) or to densities of objects with specific properties and generally support navigation in the virtual world. For this purpose a 3D sound engine was developed, which was able to run on the different hardware configurations that exist at the VR-Centre, as well as on desktop PCs. The sound engine was designed to simulate different important psychoacoustic properties, such as position (using panning algorithms), motion (using doppler effect) and environment (reverb), making it possible to create immersive soundscapes and investigate user response in such environments. The sound engine was also equipped with an advanced musical synthesizer, primarily for data mining purposes, and the design allowed it to function as a stand alone application as well as an integrated part of the VR++ software system. It has been used extensively in the data mining project and as soundscape generator in the Benogo project. Supported by the Danish Research Councils (2002-2004) as part of the 3DVDM project. (Søren Bovbjerg, Henrik R. Nagel, Erik Granum)