VIRTUAL ENVIRONMENT SIMULATION - ADVANCES IN THE DIVA PROJECT

At ICAD'96, a real-time virtual audio reality model was presented, which included model-based sound synthesizers, geometric room acoustics modeling, binaural auralization for headphone and loudspeaker listening, and high-quality animation. The DIVA environment is an integrated implementation of a virtual reality system currently aiming at a virtual symphony orchestra performance. In the current version of the software, multiple sound sources (physical models of musical instruments) are conducted by a virtual conductor (controlled by a position tracker with 3 transmitters). The real-time calculation of auralization has been enhanced by accurate HRTF approximations, a new late reverberation model, and by an efficient image source method.