Design And Evaluation Of A Low-cost 3D Sound System For Immersive Virtual Reality

Since Head Mounted Displays (HMD), data gloves, tracking systems, and powerful computer graphics resources are nowadays in an affordable price range, the usage of PC-based "Virtual Training Systems" becomes very attractive. However, due to the limited field of view of HMD devices, additional modalities have to be provided to benefit from 3D environments. Among them, a 3D sound simulation can improve the capabilities of VR systems dramatically. Unfortunately, realistic 3D sound simulations are expensive and demand a tremendous amount of computational power to calculate reverberation, occlusion, and obstruction effects. To use 3D sound in a PC-based training system as a way to direct and guide trainees to observe specific events in 3D space, a cheaper alternative has to be provided, so that a broader range of can be applied. To this issue, it focus on the evaluation of a low-cost 3D sound simulation. The experimental system setup using conventional stereo headsets in combination with a tracked HMD device, and used signal types for localizing simulated sound events in a virtual training environment, for the end, present our results with regard to precision, speed. More specifically, this investigation has two primary objectives: 1) to implement and evaluate a methodology to provide a simplified 3D sound simulation that enables precise and reliable event localization in space and 2) to select an optimal sound signal type for the above described training scenario.