The addition of multimodal feedback during navigation in a virtual environment is fundamental when aiming at fully immersive and realistic simulations. Several visual, acoustic, haptic or vibrotactile perceptual cues can be generated when walking over a ground surface. Such sensory feedback can provide crucial and varied information regarding either the ground material itself, the properties of...

Background and Challenges Modeling the acoustic properties of a virtual environment is an important step in simulating the acoustic response of building such as auditorium. It is also gaining importance for interactive applications such as games or virtual environments, where spatialized sound adds a stronger immersion effect. In practice, realistic sound can only be achieved by simulation of t...

Communication depends on accurate reception of signals by receivers, and selection acts on signals to transmit efficiently through the environment. Although learnt signals, such as birdsong, vary in their transmission properties through different habitats, few studies have addressed the role of cultural selection in driving acoustic adaptation. Here, we present a test of the hypothesis that son...

Currently one of the main research issues in Human Computer Interaction (HCI) is to develop more intuitive, multimodal and natural interfaces. Among them, the interface for triggering simple actions or selecting objects in virtual environments (VEs) is one of the concerned areas. In this paper we describe an acoustic interface which uses finger snap or hand clap sounds as the input command to i...

This paper summarizes a case study example on the methodology used for phased array microphone measurements in a realistic acoustic environment. A ducted fan rotor is measured in an environment, where structure born noise and aerodynamically generated noise cannot be separated using conventional single microphone acoustic analysis. The conditions of the measurement are similar to an industrial ...

A common problem with current automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems is that the performance degrades when it is presented with speech from a different acoustic environment than the one used during training. An important cause is that the feature distribution to which the ASR system is trained no longer matches that of a new environment. Reverberant environments can be especially harmful. I...

Despite effort spent over past years, an efficient MAC protocol design is still a challenging issue in underwater acoustic networks (UANs) mostly due to two factors: first, the long propagation delay of the acoustic signal in underwater environment; and second, the high variability of the environment. In this paper, we introduce a new MAC protocol for string UANs called Pipelined Transmission M...

Typical applications of wireless sensor networks require scalability because they are deployed in a large area. Conventional centralized systems for acoustic source localization experience practical difficulties since they focus on high accuracy in a small area rather than scalability in a large region. In this paper, we present a scalable and light-weight acoustic source localization system su...

The acoustic environment of a typical neonatal intensive care unit is very rich and may contain a large number of different sounds, which reflect the activities taking place in it. There exists a medical concern about the effect of that acoustical environment on a preterm, since loud or particular sounds may be harmful for the preterm’s further neurological development. In the reported work, an...