Acoustically enriched virtual worlds with minimum effort

Abstract

To improve user experiences and immersion within virtual environments auditory experience has long been claimed to be of notable importance [1]. This paper introduces a framework, in which objects, enriched with information about their sound properties, are being processed to generate virtual sound sources. This is done with an automatic processing of the 3D-scene and therefore minimizes the effort needed to develop a multimodal virtual world. In order to create a comprehensive auditory experience different types of sound sources have to be distinguished. We propose a differentiation into three classes: locally bound static sounds, dynamically created event based sounds, and ambient sounds to create spatial atmosphere.