RE: [x3d-public] Heilan X3D Browser Released

["Len Bullard" <cbullard@hiwaay.net>]

That's imaginative.  Cool.

The audio material node pops to the top.  Alan mentioned this to me as well.
Interior designers could take advantage of that one.  It does add to the
realism.  I ramp down ambient sounds (eg, wind, water, ambient music) using
a prox sensor when a person enters a room.  That is helpful but false to the
ear.  Having a means to adjust ambience would be useful.  Setting the
parameters of the local machine for say 'reverb' will have the same issues
of midi: the quality is limited by the local hardware.

Piping audio into scenes: streaming.  Yes.  For lots of reasons.  I think
there are deep latency issues here.  In JOI, Ratty was running radio
programs two nights a week.  It worked proportionally to bandwidth.  Some of
us were hearing the last song while others were hearing the next song.
Overall, it was great but it didn't contribute to realism.  It contributed
to immersion in the sense of a shared event, but it doesn't work as a means
to make the scene more 'real'.

Manipulation in real time:  there have been experiments with midi streams
but again, for real audio in real time, latency would be an issue in MU.

Isn't it the case that the event load is inversely proportional to the
number of people/clients that can be in a MU?

I've given no reasons not to experiment with your ideas.  Limits today tend
to go away over time and authors and composers find uses for things that
aren't always expressly intended by the implementor.

len

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-x3d-public@web3d.org [mailto:owner-x3d-public@web3d.org] On
Behalf Of Niall Moody
Sent: Monday, December 04, 2006 4:41 PM
To: Len Bullard; giles@oz.net
Cc: x3d-public@web3d.org
Subject: Re: [x3d-public] Heilan X3D Browser Released

I think the obvious omission from my point of view is the lack of a realtime
audio input node.  That would pave the way for VOIP and, with something like
Jack (http://jackaudio.org/) on Linux and OSX (I believe there's even a
version for Windows now) allow for separate apps to pipe audio into scenes.
I have to admit I have very little experience with doing this kind of thing
over the internet though, so I've no idea how hard it would be to actually
implement the streaming of audio to/from multiple clients.

Related to this, though probably not as important to most people, is the
ability to stream control data from audio apps.  Heilan uses OSC
(http://www.cnmat.berkeley.edu/OpenSoundControl/) for this, and with
software such as Max/MSP (http://www.cycling74.com/products/maxmsp) there
are huge possibilities for live performance, particularly if that software
is also streaming audio into the scene.  A simple example would be to just
move sounds around the 3d space, but you could take it further and have the
performer also manipulating the (visual) scene itself.  And of course,
programs like Max have a lot of support already for alternative hardware
interfaces, as well as numerous ways of manipulating the data from them.

Another thing that strikes me as fairly obvious is reverb/ambience.  It
seems to me that X3D should specify some way of defining how sound interacts
with the various surfaces in a scene.  A simplistic implementation could
just specify bounding boxes within which certain reverb parameters apply
(this box sounds like a cave, that one sounds like a cathedral...).  Or,
taking the idea to its logical conclusion, you could have a system where you
can specify the acoustic properties of different surfaces (this wall damps
the sound, that floor reflects it...).  That's probably far too ambitious,
and definitely overkill for what most people would want to use X3D for, but
from a composer's point of view, the ability to actually create spaces with
their own acoustic character within which sounds can be placed and moved (as
opposed to fiddling with the parameters of a reverb plugin and a panpot,
say) would be incredibly useful.

Personally, I'd also like ways of creating audiovisual mappings in an X3D
scene (say you have a node that takes the amplitude envelope of an
AudioClip, and constantly outputs events with the current state of the
envelope - you could then route that to the size of a Box node, and have a
simplistic audio visualisation).  I'd guess most people would really have no
use for such a feature though, and with realtime audio input and OSC
support, it could be easily faked with outside software.

Oh, and low latency audio is a must if realtime performance is involved,
though obviously if you're doing this over the internet, there are other
factors which will pretty much negate any benefits from choosing to use ASIO
over DirectSound drivers etc.


- Niall.


----- Original Message ----
From: Len Bullard <cbullard@hiwaay.net>
To: giles@oz.net; Niall Moody <niallmoody@yahoo.co.uk>
Cc: x3d-public@web3d.org
Sent: Saturday, 2 December, 2006 11:27:55 AM
Subject: RE: [x3d-public] Heilan X3D Browser Released

++1.

Although, off the top of my head, I'm not finding any particular rendering
deficiencies other than no support for mp3 or some other advanced
compression that is supported by middle tier toolkits such as Adobe
Audition.  I find that the size barrier is the most basic problem.  Then the
availability which is a chops, market, and copyright combination and can't
be solved by X3D.  Audio rendering is best achieved by using decent sample
sources and sizes.  Again, for a complex sound, going below 22khz is deadly.

There are some basic VRML/X3D building techniques that can be better
proselytized so graphics artists who are not audio specialists can build
faster.  For example, I've been working on simple techniques for making the
ambient background sounds hush when a room is entered and using the audio
isActive events to trigger animation effects to get around
startTime/stopTime unreliability.  These are just practice though.

Streaming definitely.  Server support for VOIP naturally.

The use of audio creates so much serendipity and potential for VR that this
is not in doubt.  For increasing the reach into other markets such as the
immersive album, this is definitely possible and actually pretty simple to
do.  It is a genre that can be developed quickly and pushed out cheaply.
This one is really a matter of access to the market moguls.

len



From: owner-x3d-public@web3d.org [mailto:owner-x3d-public@web3d.org] On
Behalf Of Alan Hudson

Audio rendering should be as expressive as the graphics.







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