For more information, please contact:
AuSIM, Inc
William L. Chapin
+1 (650) 322-8746
info@ausim3d.com

August 4, 2010, Palo Alto, CA  -- AuSIM completes a NASA Langley SBIR Phase II contract entitled "Improving Binaural Simulation of Structural Acoustics", in collaboration with Prof Marty Johnson at the Virginia Polytechnic Institute.  The NASA grant enabled AuSIM's "SPEWFN" project, an acronym for "Singular-value decomposition, Principal components analysis, Equivalent source reduction, Wavetracing, Finite-element method, and Networked parallel computing", which comprise the technologies integrated by the project. 

The primary benefit of the project was the innovation of a fixed-filtering engine scheme.  Previously, dynamic 3D audio was dependent on dynamically changing signal processing filters.  The dynamic filters were 1) computationally expensive, 2) scaled directly with the number of sound propagation paths, 3) blamed for perceptual artifacts.  The fixed filtering scheme takes a fixed cost of running a bank of filters no matter the number of sound propagation paths, and scales by a small increment for each additional sound path.  The research shows that the fixed filtering approach delivers minimal computational advantage with fewer than 50 sound paths, but begins to shine for 100's.  This result does not benefit applications which use relatively few sound paths, such as telecommunications.  But sound-intensive applications such as architecture, training simulators, SONAR, structural acoustics, and entertainment can be enabled to a new range of possibilities. 

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