◈ Title : 3D Sound Research at Virtual Audio Systems Laboratory (NRL 2005~2010)
◈ Speaker : Prof. Youngjin Park (KAIST)
◈ Date & Time : Friday, April 15, 2011 (14:00pm ~ 15:30pm)
◈ Place : LG Research Building, Room #101
◈ Host : Prof.  Sangchul Won (Tel. 2221)
◈ Abstract : Human mainly depends on the visual and auditory cues to capture spatial information about the environment. Frequently, auditory cues are often given minimal attention in designing the virtual environment. However, auditory cues play an important role in production of the virtual environment because spatial information provided by vision only is limited only to the viewing direction. The ability to identify the location of a sound source is called auditory localization and technologies that replicate the sounds from a real environment through an artificially created environment based on human’s auditory localization are known as 3D sound technology. Virtual Audio Systems Laboratory (VASL) at KAIST has been studying 3D sound technology and its applications. In this seminar, we overview the research activities of VASL related to 3D sound technology. There are two main topics in this seminar. The one is the high-fidelity Virtual Auditory Display (VAD) system which generates spatial virtual sounds in 3D space and conveys them to a listener without measurement of the individual Head-Related Transfer Functions (HRTFs). The second one is the robot auditory system in which sound source localization   is possible to achieve the effective human-robot interaction. The developed high-fidelity VAD system can be easily applied to many practical application fields including games, home theatre, virtual reality, and military simulator, etc. The developed robot auditory system, which includes artificial ear, MEMS sensor, SoC for sound localization and speaker/speech recognition, can be used for intelligent robots to process speech/acoustic signals. On going research topics in the laboratory including an idea of auditory system for hologram are introduced as well.