An Immersive Virtual Environment for Congruent Audio-Visual Spatialized Data Sonifications
Abstract
The use of spatialization techniques in data sonification provides
system designers with an additional tool for conveying information
to users. Oftentimes, spatialized data sets are meant to be
experienced by a single or few users at a time. Projects at Rensselaer's
Collaborative-Research Augmented Immersive Virtual Environment
Laboratory allow even large groups of collaborators to
work within a shared virtual environment system. The lab provides
an equal emphasis on the visual and audio system, with a
nearly 360° panoramic display and 128-loudspeaker array housed
behind the acoustically-transparent screen. The space allows for
dynamic switching between immersions in recreations of physical
scenes and presentations of abstract or symbolic data. Content
creation for the space is not a complex process-the entire display
is essentially a single desktop and straight-forward tools such as
the Virtual Microphone Control allow for dynamic real-time spatialization.
With the ability to target individual channels in the
array, audio-visual congruency is achieved. The loudspeaker array
creates a high-spatial density soundfield within which users are
able to freely explore due to the virtual elimination of a so-called
“sweet-spot.”