Myself and Graham (Graham on the hardware and software communicating side hardware and myself with the audio) have now managed our first major success!
We can now play a sound in 3D but without turning your head effecting the position of the sound.
Why is this significant? Well, if a sound is playing at a certain location in 3D space, then it is playing relative to the forward direction in which the headphones are facing. That is, if the sound is coming directly from the right, it is playing only on the right hand speaker of the headphones. But if I now turn 90 degrees, it is still playing on the right speaker and the position of the sound has changed! This is obviously not what we want.
Using the digital compass, we can now detect the direction in which the user is facing and then adjust the forward vector of the listener in the FMOD 3D audio API, so that the 3D sound position gets recalculated to take the direction in which the user is facing into account.
And the best part is... IT WORKS!
Take a look at Grahams photo of the headset!
We will now be spending a day or two testing this on the lab guinea pigs (err, I mean, people passing through the labs) and also testing different sounds to determine which sounds are easiest to localize in 3D (some sounds appear to be easier to localize than others).
After this, the next step is to combine this with the actual position of the user. That is, adding Ubisense support to the system. But.. problem: DCU's Ubisense system has not yet been installed and could possibly take another significant amount of time.
Luckily, myself and Graham have some contact with people in UCD, who have had a Ubisense system installed for a few years now. Alan suggested we get in touch with Dr. Lorcan Coyle from the UCD Complex & Adaptive Systems Lab (Myself and Graham also know Lorcan from the Odysseus program, which both of us participated in, in the summer of 2006).
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