Virtual Reality : How It Works

12 Pages 3119 Words

an interesting use for virtual sound that would allow an astronaut to hear the state of their oxygen, or have an acoustical beacon that directs one to a trouble spot on a satellite. The "Convolvotron" is one such device that simulates the location of up to four audio channels with a sort of imaginary sphere surrounding the listener. This device takes into account that each person has specialized auditory signal processing, and personalizes what each person hears. Using a position sensor from Polhemus, another VR research company, it is possible to move the position of sound by simply moving a small cube around in your hand. The key to the Convolvotron is something called the "Head- Related Transfer Function (HRTF)", which is a set of mathematically modelable responses that our ears impose on the signals they get from the air. In order to develop the HRTF, researchers had to sit people in an anechoic room surrounded with 144 different speakers to measure the effects of hearing precise sounds from every direction by using tiny microphone probes p...