Sandrine Ceurstemont, video producer
Video games are full of realistic-looking crashes but creating authentic sound to accompany the visuals can be complicated. Now Changxi Zheng and colleagues at Cornell University have come up with a new model that can accurately reproduce the clattering and clanging produced when objects collide.
In the video above, collisions in a complex marble run produce high frequency sounds that are notoriously hard to simulate. But Zheng's system tackles the problem by modelling how the surface of each object vibrates. In this case, each section of the course was analysed separately. "We first simulated the motion then synthesized the sound based on the forces produced during the simulation," says Zheng. The squeaking sound of the pipes at the beginning of the video, and the chattering shopping cart at the end, are usually tricky to reproduce but the method produced a realistic result.
Now the team is improving the model by developing a more robust algorithm and by tweaking the way they simulate how sound travels. "Currently we consider the sound propagation from each object individually without looking at sound scattering," says Zheng. "For certain cases, such as a spoon falling into a mug, lack of sound interaction can introduce artefacts."
Simulating high quality sound is important for creating virtual reality applications, and according to Doug James, a member of the team, their technique is laying the foundation to make that possible. "In the future, computers will routinely create virtual realities with realistic physics, motion, graphics and sound, all in real time," he says.
This work will be presented at this year's Siggraph conference in Vancouver, Canada from 7-11 August.
If you enjoyed this post, check out the rest of our web special on the Future of Virtual Reality.