Three Different Modes of Avatars as Virtual Lecturers in E-learning Interfaces: A Comparative Usability Study

Author/Creator ORCID

Date

2009-01-09

Department

Program

Citation of Original Publication

Foad Hamid and Bill Kapralos, A Review of Spatial Sound for Virtual Environments and Games with Graphics Processing Units, The Open Virtual Reality Journal vol 1 pp 8-17, doi: 10.2174/1875323X01002010008

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Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported

Subjects

Abstract

The generation of spatial audio and audio processing in general using traditional software-based methods and techniques is computationally prohibitive thereby limiting the number of, and type of auditory effects that can be incorporated into applications. In contrast to consumer-grade audio cards, the graphics processing units (GPUs) of video cards have moved away from the traditional fixed-function 3D graphics pipeline towards a flexible general-purpose computational engine that can currently implement many parallel algorithms directly using the graphics hardware resulting in tremen¬dous computational speed-ups. Various spatial audio applications are well suited for GPU-based processing providing developers of virtual environments and games with the possibility of incorporating real-time, spatial audio into their simulations. This paper presents an overview of the research efforts that have utilized the GPU for the implementation of spatial sound for virtual environments and games. Approaches to GPU-based spatial sound are summarized and their advantages and disadvantages are presented