[X3D-Public] potential free audio formats for X3D - ogg and flac

[Michael Aratow]

I also agree wholeheartedly with revising the spec for true audio 
spatialization.

We should align with the most current and adopted open standard for 
sound (OpenAL?, and if so, as Michaelis has suggested, convert from 
ovals to spheres).

Dave's suggestions are also great; hardware has been able to perform 
true 3D spatialization of sound for a long time: anyone who remembers 
Aureal, a descendent of Crystal River Engineering, knows that their 
cards were easily capable of performing true sound spatialization, but 
Creative bought Aureal as it was failing and I believe locked up the 
technology, much like Computer Associates did with the Cosmo Player 
technology.

Sound always has taken a second seat to graphics, but is just as 
compelling.

Let's get the spec to be able to take on phase and even HRTFs (Head 
Related Transfer Functions) which are used in true audio spatialization.

Mike
On 5/10/13 2:24 PM, Dave A wrote:
> On 5/10/2013 12:49 PM, Michalis Kamburelis wrote:
>>
>>>> X3D working group: we should also consider improving the aural
>>>> spatialization model in next year's X3D v3.4. 
>
> Good point!
>
> I think it's high time we look at incorporating phase, aka 
> time-of-flight, into audio. Binaural or holographic sound is more a 
> matter of the timing between when one of your ears hears a sound 
> before the other, than of the loudness of that sound. With normal 
> stereo 'spatialization' the sound can't sound further apart than the 
> two speakers you have (and multi-speaker systems are, IMHO a hack). 
> But phase-correct stereo, the sound may even have about the same 
> loudness in each ear, yet sound like it's coming from 'way over there' 
> or 'up there' or 'back there'.
>
> I'm pretty sure many hardwares support this, and even if not, today's 
> processors can handle it. It's at least worth looking at. Even if the 
> typical PC is not up to it today, it will be by the time a spec is 
> agreed upon.
>
> A simple first step would just be to delay the waveform based on the 
> distance the audio source is from the current camera, +/- inter-ear 
> distance, plus some attenuation for the more-distant ear. Not too 
> different from stereo vision in concept.
>
> Dave A.
>
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