The Immersive Audio Environment

The effectiveness of virtual environments depends largely on how efficiently they recreate the real world. In the case of auditory virtual environments, the importance of accurate recreation is enhanced since there are no visual cues to assist perception, as in the case of audio-visual virtual environments. In this paper, we present the Immersive Audio Environment (IAE), an easily constructible and portable structure, which is capable of 3D sound auralization with very high spatial resolution. The IAE was designed to provide an effective military training facility. The IAE was further improved by incorporating a tracking system to it, which would help evaluate subject training performance. This includes a combination of an existing infrared tracking system and a specially designed system of inertial tracking. In this paper we describe in detail all the aspects of the IAE including both hardware and software. We present the tests and results used to evaluate the accuracy of both the audio and the tracking systems with respect to our application, and verify the efficacy of using the IAE for military training enhancement.