Spatializer: A web-based positional audio toolkit

Abstract

The web is becoming increasingly multimedia enabled and visuals have paved the way to the point where high quality online videos and detailed three-dimensional virtual worlds are now a reality. Innovative audio applications have been lagging somewhat, but positional audio system are gradually gaining attention as they help people to attain a better spatial perception and immersion into three-dimensional virtual spaces by presenting important spatial cues. However, existing positional audio systems provide either interactive, live voice communications for networked virtual environments or 3D renderings of pre-recorded sounds, but not both. Here we describe our web-based prototype system called Spatializer that encapsulates positional audio functionalities for both dynamic voice communications and static sound sources, all in a peer-to-peer toolkit with a simple yet powerful unified web interface. © 2010 ACM.