ACUTE Lab

Sound engineering, in more detail, refers to acoustic and tactile Engineering (ACUTE) being driven forward by the Simulation and Data Lab (SDL) ACUTE in Iceland in collaboration with FZJ in RAISE. There is an essential element of ACUTE in individual 3D spatial auditory displays for immersive virtual environments. 3D sound technologies can provide accurate information about the relationship between a sound source and the surrounding environment, including the listener herself/ himself. This information cannot be substituted by any other modality (e.g. visual or tactile). Nevertheless, today’s spatial representation of audio tends to be simplistic and with poor interaction capabilities, being multimodal systems primarily focused on graphics processing and integrated with basic audio solutions. This use case in RAISE aims to convey environmental information via acoustics using binaural sounds (3D). Typically, binaural audio technologies rely on head-related transfer functions (HRTFs), specific digital filters that capture the human head’s acoustic effects. Obtaining personal HRTF data is only possible with expensive equipment and invasive recording procedures.

CoE: RAISE