ACCESS Open House Demonstration Abstracts

Vanilla Sound Server

Vanilla Sound Server

Juhan Sonin, Applications Development Researcher; 217-244-6093
jsonin@ncsa.uiuc.edu

http://hol.ncsa.uiuc.edu

The Audio Development Group (ADG) at NCSA is developing software software to address these challenges. The result is real-time sonification, which will bring a new, content-rich dimension to information flow that can improve the speed and quality of human reactions in situations that require control. Properly programmed sonification can provide almost instantly reveal how complex data sets are changing in real time. In two educational prototypes demonstrated here, we show how VSS can be used to represent aurally surface runoff data as simulated via a hydrologic code, and as a web navigational aid.

Born from virtual reality research conducted at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, ADG has developed a proprietary software strategy and component architecture called "Sound Authoring." The Virtual Sound Server (the sound scheduler and API) is a mature application of several years; it is cross-platform, cross-network, and cross-application.

The output is realtime sound environments featuring synthesized and/or data driven and/or static sound representations.

The objective is to create tools that allow people to coordinate visual and sound information in a way which maximizes information content and minimizes digestion time. In support of the Alliance EOT, VSS technology is being integrated into a number of education prototypes, including museum-based, virtual reality exhibits being developed by the NSF-funded Mississippi RiverWeb (sm) Museum Consortium. In addition, as an enabling technology, VSS is finding applications to data visualization and story telling within high end virtual environments such as The CAVE (tm).

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