Events

Interactive Sound Simulation and Rendering

Lecture / Panel
 
For NYU Community

 

Extending the frontier of visual computing, sound rendering utilizes sound to communicate information to a user and offers an alternative means of visualization. By harnessing the sense of hearing, audio rendering can further enhance a user's experience in a multimodal virtual world and is required for immersive environments, computer games, engineering simulation, virtual training, and designing next generation human-computer interfaces.

In this talk, we will give an overview of our recent work on sound propagation, spatial sound, sound synthesis, and sound rendering. These include generating realistic physically-based sounds from rigid body dynamics simulations and liquid sounds based on bubble resonance and coupling with fluid simulators.  We also describe new and fast algorithms for sound propagation based on improved wave-based techniques and  fast geometric sound propagation. Our algorithms improve the state of the art in sound propagation by almost 1-2 orders
of magnitude and we demonstrate that it is possible to perform interactive propagation in complex, dynamic environments by utilizing the computational capabilities of multi-core CPUs and many-core GPUs. We describe new techniques to compute personalized HRTFs and have
integrated our algorithms the Oculus VR Headset.   We also demonstrate applications to design of next-generation musical  instruments, computer gaming, room acoustics, and outdoor sound propagation.

Joint work with faculty and students of GAMMA group at UNC Chapel Hill.


Biography:

Dinesh Manocha is currently the Phi Delta Theta/Mason Distinguished Professor of Computer Science  at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.  He has received many awards such as NSF Career Award, Sloan Fellowship, Office of Naval Research Young Investigator, Honda Research, etc. Along with his students, Manocha has also received 13 best paper & panel  awards at the leading conferences on graphics, geometric modeling, visualization, multimedia, and high-performance computing. He is a Fellow of ACM, AAAS, and IEEE and received Distinguished Alumni Award from Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi. Manocha has published more than 400 papers in the leading conferences and journals.  Some of the software systems related to collision detection, GPU-based algorithms, sound simulation, and geometric computing developed by his group have been downloaded by more than 150K users and are licensed to more than 50 leading companies in computer graphics, CAD, simulation, gaming, and robotics.  He has supervised 28 Ph.D. dissertations.


For more information, please contact Prof. Claudio Silva.