A range of platforms facilitate the design of virtual environments. Most commonly, game engines, such as Unity and Unreal, are used for developing and simulating virtual realities. However, such platforms are primarily oriented towards visual design and provide only limited audio functionality. Furthermore, these platforms utilize separate editing and rendering modes, and operate on desktop platforms. Making use of existing research into the development of interactive virtual soundscapes, we introduce a novel user interface that enables the rapid design of both virtual sonic environments, and the assets (i.e. sound objects and sound zones) contained within them.

Specifically, our UI offers the following contributions:

• provides a 3D design environment specific to sonic virtual realities, with specialized components such as sound objects and sound zones;


• offers both interactive and parametric control over the attributes of such components, enabling a precise authoring of highly-detailed environments;


• introduces a multi-cone model for creating 3D sound objects with complex propagation characteristics;


• enables adding dynamism to objects via hand drawn motion trajectories that can be edited in 3D;


• makes it possible to design virtual sound fields at various scales using multiple view and attribute windows;


• offers a unified interface for the design and the simulation of such realities, allowing the user to modify a sound field in real-time;


• operates on the web-browser so that it supports mobile devices, which therefore makes it possible for the user to simultaneously explore and edit augmented sonic realities.

PDF

Camci, A., Murray, P., Forbes, A.G., Designing and Controlling Virtual Sonic Environments Using a Browser-based 3DUI, Proceedings of the 3DUI 2016 IEEE Symposium on 3D User Interfaces, Greenville, SC, March 19th, 2016.