Educational Games. Audio-only Virtual Acoustic Positioning Research

With the development of computer technology, educational games has played its positive role in CKS in the teaching process. It can stimulate students a high degree of motivation, increased students'interest in learning. However, almost all of the current educational games are based on vision. In this case, visually impaired people are excluded. In order that visually impaired people can also enjoy the fun of educational games, some research groups developed audio-only educational games which completely based on the acoustic information, although some related technology has not yet perfectly developed and the game itself has not been widely acknowledged. In audio-only games, accurate localization and navigation about the virtual sources is the most critical, because all the operations among the game-play depends on the correct auditory navigation. So this study focus on the researching of localization theories about virtual sound source, additionally the application and performance of positioning in audio-only games are included.This study includes the following elements:1.The human's localization theories about sound source:including the impact of ITD, ILD, ear's effects to localization and the important roles of HRTF impacting on the ear's localization.2. Describing the authoring of virtual environments in audio-only games, which includes the most critical data sonification and interaction. This study introduces the detail information of the design methods and setup of interaction and data sonification.3. In order to solving the distortion problem of sound image in the procees of reproducing 3D virtual sounds, this study analyzes several methods and their respective localizational effectiveness of HRTF data's individual matching.4. In order to realise the real-time play which is limited by the computational complexity and high storage capacity of the HRTF datadase, this study impresses the HRTF datadase using the PCA method, and then tests the effect of reconstructional HRTF data. In addition, based on the PCA compression, K-means method is taken to compress the azimuth data of HRTF.5. Realizing the headphones-based reproduction and localization of multi-sound-source based on Matlab platform in the virtual static scene. This study tests the effect of the virtual sound localization by the way of making subjects to draw the scene layout.