Capture and Recreation of Spatial Audio for HCI and Virtual Reality

After a brief introduction to my broader research, this talk will focus on research on the capture of spatial sound, and its reproduction over headphones and speakers.

Humans are very good at discerning the spatial origin of sound using a mixture of monaural and binaural cues in disparate environments ranging from open spaces to small crowded rooms. This ability helps us to interact with others and the environment by sorting out individual sounds from a mixture, and helps us to survive by warning us of danger over a wider region of space compared to vision. These advantages of spatial sound are also potentially of benefit in the fields of human-computer interaction, teleconferencing and telepresence.

In this talk I will present an introduction to the problem of creating and acquiring spatially valid audio, and present our recent results in

  1. Developing a novel way for extremely fast acquisition of HRTFs for individuals, using a combination of scientific computation and ingenious experimentation
  2. A technique for real-time acquisition and “image-based” rendering of soundscapes using multi microphone acquisition using spherical microphone arrays

Speaker Details

Ramani Duraiswami is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science and the Institute for Advanced Computer Studies, at the University of Maryland, College Park. He obtained the B.Tech degree from IIT Bombay and a Ph.D. from Johns He directs research at the Perceptual Interfaces and Reality Laboratory there. His current research interests can broadly be categorized as lying in the three areas of Audio for Virtual Reality and Human Computer Interaction, Scientific Computing (with a focus on the Fast Multipole Method and GPU computing), and Computational Machine Learning and Vision. He is a Member of the IEEE Audio and Electroacoustics Technical Committee, Vice Chair of the IEEE Signal Processing Washington Chapter, and was till recently Associate Editor of the ACM Transactions on Applied Perception. More information on Dr. Duraiswami’s research and publications can be obtained from .

Date:
Speakers:
Ramani Duraiswami
Affiliation:
University of Maryland