Author: stefamed

Big congratulations to Justyna Maculewicz from the lab who successfully defended her PhD thesis on rhythmic walking interaction with auditory and haptic feedback.

Stefania Serafin, Rolf Nordahl, Cumhur Erkut and Amalia De Goetzen will run a workshop entitled “ Sonic Interaction for virtual environments” during the IEEE Virtual Reality Conference on March 30th, 2014 in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

Sonic interaction design is defined as the study and exploitation of sound as one of the principal channels conveying information, meaning, and aesthetic/emotional qualities in interactive contexts. This field lies at the intersection of interaction design and sound and music computing.

In the virtual reality community, the focus on research in topics related to auditory feedback hasbeen rather limited when compared, for example, to the focus placed on visual feedback or even on haptic feedback. However, in communities such as the film community or the product sound design community it is well known that sound is a powerful way to communicate meaning and emotion to a scene or a product.

The main goal of this workshop is to increase among the virtual reality community the awareness of the importance of sonic elements when designing virtual environments. We will also discuss how research in other related fields such as film sound theory, product sound design, sound and music computing, game sound design and computer music can inform designers of virtual reality environments.

Moreover, the workshop will feature state of the art research on the field of sound for virtual environments.

We expect participants to submit a research paper (4 to 6 pages in using IEEE template) outlining their current research in the field of interactive sound for virtual environments.

Topics can include, but are not limited to:

1) Sound synthesis and design for virtual environments

2) Sound modelling and rendering for virtual environments

3) Sound spatialisation

4) Headphones and speakers reproduction

5) Gestural control of sound in virtual reality

6) Multisensory (audio-visual), (audio-haptics) interactions

7)Evaluation of user experience and sound quality

The proceedings of the workshop will be published by IEEE Press and the best contributions will be published in the special issue of a journal (to be finalised).

The multimodal experience lab has recently been featured in the main headlines for the weekly newsmail from Ingeniøren.
The full article is here in danish, but as always google translate does a great job.