In an innovative line of research, experts from the Cornell University may have made an important contribution to the developing field of direct sound simulation and playback. In today's virtual reality, when something happens on screen, the sounds that go along with that event are usually recorded and played back at the same intensity throughout the experience. Now, associate professor of computer science Doug James and graduate student Changxi Zheng set the basis for a piece of computer simulation software that can generate the noises of a falling water drop.

 

Sounds like splash, splatter, babble, sploosh, drip, drop, bloop and ploop have thus far remained impossible to create using simulators, but their newest invention has the ability to faithfully recreate this class of sounds, and many others. The strive at this point, globally speaking, is to make a virtual environment that fully captivates people, in which all images and sounds are created on the spot, depending on how we, as users, interact with objects. But, naturally, obstacles exist, and some find it hard to feel caught in the experience if there's something constantly bothering us.

 

“We have no way to efficiently compute the sounds of water splashing, paper crumpling, hands clapping, wind in trees or a wine glass dropped onto the floor,” the team said in their research proposal. The study, to be presented August 3-7 in New Orleans, at the 2009 ACM SIGGRAPH conference, relied on a $1.4 million grant from the Human Centered Computing Program of the National Science Foundation (NSF). The most impressive thing about the design is that now, it can replicate the sounds of cymbals and trash bins, glass and its interacting shatters, as well as a bunch of LEGO pieces interacting inside their container.

 

The team says that, at this point, the system is well prepared to handle compact sound sources, but that, with further research, it could become efficient enough to qualify for use in live applications, where the images are not recorded beforehand. Online multiplayer games are one possible application that could benefit from this type of sound processor, as well as other types of multimedia-based 3D interactions, such as when wearing 3D goggles.