Crystal River Engineering Inc of Groveland, California has released details of its work to set a universal protocol standard for managing complex audio sources in virtual environments. With the recent advances in algorithms and hardware and the integration of audio into mainstream virtual reality applications, there has been a growing need to develop an extensible protocol for virtual audio, according to Scott Foster, president of Crystal River and a director of Division Inc (the collaborative project set up between Crystal River, Division Ltd of Bristol, UK, and Fako Space Labs of Menlo Park, California). Complex acoustic effects can now be created, enhancing the quality of virtual reality simulations but also requiring powerful control structures (ensuring) inter-operability across different system configurations without major software re-writes, he has argued. Thus, the Virtual Audio client-server Protocol has been formulated over the last year, and duly presented at the recent Sarnhoff Institute workshop on Virtual Environments at Princeton. Other recent offerings from Crystal include the Beachtron single personal computer board for adding three-dimensional audio to virtual reality applications, and the Acoustetron, for the integration of stereoscopic visual cueing and listener tracking capability in the development of virtual audio applications. The company also produces the Convolvotron system, which uses signal processing to spatialise live or recorded audio tracks to generate sound effects in a virtual environment and which has been adopted by the aerospace, entertainment and telecommunications industries. Previous to this, the company developed three dimensional technology as part of the NASA Ames View project.
