| Summary: | Approved for public release, distribution unlimited === Commercially available spatial audio systems for synthetic environments suffer from excessive cost and the requirement for in-house application software development. The purpose of this work was to develop a low cost audio hardware and software system capable of generating aural cues for a synthetic environment in real-time, which correctly reflects the user's location and accurately conveys the type and location of the sound event. The approach taken was to first implement a software communication package using DIS (distributed Interactive Simulation protocol, a Department of Defense standard) to retrieve information from the virtual world. The second step was to develop algorithms and software to process that information and model the physical sound world. Finally, an audio hardware system capable of generating the required audio cues in real-time was constructed. The result of this work is a system consisting of software and audio hardware for generating spatial aural cues that correctly localize a sound event for users in a virtual world. The system makes use of 'off-the-shelf' audio hardware (MIDI capable sampler, amplifiers, and speakers) which reduces the cost from $20,000 to less than $5,000. With minor modifications for MIDI port access and graphics library function calls, the software can be utilized on any computer that reads DIS packets from the network and writes MIDI data to a data port.
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