| Summary: | <p> Many of the applications, virtual environments, and video games available to average computer users integrate stunning three-dimensional (3D) graphics and real-world visualizations. Developers spend an extraordinary amount of time and effort creating these immersive, realistic virtual environments, primarily focusing on the graphics components. Within these virtual realities, the user should easily perceive the locations of sound sources accurately, as well as the acoustic nature of the environment. However, for reasons of economy and simplicity, most developers apply readily available industry standards for generating pseudo-3D sounds in their applications. This research explores the shortcomings of these standards, proposes an effective alternative, and provides a detailed analysis of the various possible approaches. </p><p> This project includes a number of computationally efficient, physics-based 3D acoustics simulations, each of which will produce realistic aural reproductions. The primary goal is to evaluate and compare these algorithms against each other, non-3D sound reproduction, and the current industry standards (e.g. Microsoft's DirectX<sup>®</sup> pseudo-3D algorithm). We will test three hypotheses. First, users will find that physics-based 3D algorithms will render improved auralization reproductions compared against industry standards like DirectX<sup>®</sup> and/or OpenAL. Second, localization and spatialization will improve with user training when using these algorithms. Finally, we should discover an unambiguous ranking system for the quality of each tested algorithm.</p>
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