COOLVR: Implementing Audio in a Virtual Environment Toolkit

Abstract

COOLVR (Complete Object Oriented Library for Virtual Reality) is a toolkit currently being developed at the Graphics, Visualization, and Usability Center (GVU) at Georgia Tech. The toolkit is written to allow programmers to easily create virtual environments (VE's) which will compile cross platform. Unlike most VE toolkits which focus effort primarily on the visual senses, COOLVR aims to equally engage both the sense of sight and the sense of hearing. One of the main design goals of the COOLVR toolkit is to give the programmer an intuitive method to enrich the virtual world with auditory cues. COOLVR uses a set of cross platform audio rendering modules to conduct real time sound processing. By providing potential designers with the capability of easily integrating spatial audio in a virtual world, a heightened level of immersivity or presence can be achieved in COOLVR environments. (This short paper was presented at the 1997 International Conference on Auditory Display at Xerox PARC)