CS Events

Extending the frontier of visual computing, sound rendering utilizes
sound to communicate information to a user and offers an alternative
means of visualization. By harnessing the sense of hearing, audio
rendering can further enhance a user's experience in a multimodal
virtual world and is required for immersive environments, computer
games, engineering simulation, virtual training,
and designing next generation human-computer interfaces.


In this talk, we will give an overview of our recent work on sound
propagation, spatial sound, sound synthesis, and sound rendering.
These include generating realistic physically-based sounds from rigid
body dynamics simulations and liquid sounds based on bubble resonance
and coupling with fluid simulators. We also describe new and fast
algorithms for sound propagation based on improved wave-based
techniques and fast geometric sound propagation. Our algorithms
improve the state of the art in sound propagation by almost 1-2 orders
of magnitude and we demonstrate that it is possible to perform
interactive propagation in complex, dynamic environments by utilizing
the computational capabilities of multi-core CPUs and many-core GPUs.
We describe new techniques to compute personalized HRTFs and have
integrated our algorithms the Oculus VR Headset.
We also demonstrate applications to design of next-generation musical
instruments, computer gaming, room acoustics, and outdoor sound propagation.



Joint work with faculty and students of GAMMA group at UNC Chapel
Hill.