Re: Oculus Rift + 3D sound
Re: Oculus Rift + 3D sound I got TTS working in Unity. Don't know why I thought it was a problem. Turned out not to be. URL: http://forum.audiogames.net/viewtopic.php?pid=261117#p261117 ___ Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: Oculus Rift + 3D sound
Re: Oculus Rift + 3D sound Thanks, magurp244.Peter Meijer's project does interest me. I was thinking that the Rift might be used in combination with sounds to scan 2D paintings, similar to what the vOICe is doing, but with the sweep across the image controlled by the gaze of the viewer, so you could go back and forth over areas that interested you, for example.I have also been following developments in the use of sonar-like technology to assist navigation in the real world. I'm thinking of projects like this:http://research.microsoft.com/apps/pubs … ?id=256564If a real-world solution ever catches on, it would make sense to transfer the same system into the virtual world. Someone accustomed to the real-world experience would then have a very familiar experience in the virtual world, and presumably would find the virtual space quite convincingly real. URL: http://forum.audiogames.net/viewtopic.php?pid=261094#p261094 ___ Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: Oculus Rift + 3D sound
Re: Oculus Rift + 3D sound Ian Reed,Thanks for the offer of help. My C# is weak, which is why I say I found TTS in Unity to be difficult. It looks like there have been developments since the last time I looked into it, though. I'll have to try again. I might contact you if I find I can't do it on my own. URL: http://forum.audiogames.net/viewtopic.php?pid=261044#p261044 ___ Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: Oculus Rift + 3D sound
Re: Oculus Rift + 3D sound Hi, again.I've posted a test environment that you could try, if you like. The link is at the end of this post.Once you unzip the file, you will get an exe and a data folder. If you run the exe (radarscan.exe) you will be presented with a menu asking about your screen settings. You can skip through it to the play button. When you launch the game you will hear a sound sweeping around you. That is the hum from the sound-emitting ball tracing the shape of the buildings that surround you. What you are hearing is not a recording. It is a dynamically changing 3D sound being spatialized by the realspace 3D audio plug-in. To exit, just hit escape.Here's the link to the 28 MB zip file:http://medievalist.net/radarscan.zipGlenn URL: http://forum.audiogames.net/viewtopic.php?pid=261018#p261018 ___ Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: Oculus Rift + 3D sound
Re: Oculus Rift + 3D sound Thanks again for all the advice and information.I have not been able to figure out how to use TTS inside Unity. From what I've seen in the Unity forum, that is not easy. What I've had to do for some of my tests was to record voiceovers, as Sneak suggested.I am going to have to follow your leads and study what I find before coming back. URL: http://forum.audiogames.net/viewtopic.php?pid=261001#p261001 ___ Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: Oculus Rift + 3D sound
Re: Oculus Rift + 3D sound Am I correct that the usual way to navigate in a virtual 3D game space designed for the blind is for keystrokes or mouse clicks to map to specific distances or rotation angles? I get the impression from what I've read that it's common for a key-press to rotate the player thirty degrees, for example, or for a single key-press to move the player forward one unit. Is that true? Personally, I think it would be very difficult to keep track of the direction you are facing in the space, if you have to count your rotation clicks and just imagine turning. That's why I imagine head-tracking would work better. If I'm right, it would help to have a device that did nothing but track the position of a user's head, without all the more expensive and technically challenging hardware required for stereoscopic vision. URL: http://forum.audiogames.net/viewtopic.php?pid=260989#p260989 ___ Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: Oculus Rift + 3D sound
Re: Oculus Rift + 3D sound Sneak, thanks for that suggestion. I had been thinking of something similar, which is splitting the ray into two, spreading them a few degrees apart, and assigning different sounds to each. I thought the resulting chord might communicate the angle of a wall, relative to the player, for example. I will have to try doing something like that, now that you've suggested it might work. URL: http://forum.audiogames.net/viewtopic.php?pid=260987#p260987 ___ Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: Oculus Rift + 3D sound
Re: Oculus Rift + 3D sound Thanks for all the responses. A similar post to the Oculus forum received no responses at all.It appears that you don't mind long posts on this forum, so I'll respond at length.First, I am not a game developer. I am an educator. I use the Unity game engine to teach ancient Roman and Medieval art and architecture. I use it to give my students some sense of what it would be like to experience foreign or ancient cities and buildings in person, that is, to experience them in their own bodies. I've made a medieval monastery, a Roman city, and various other things. Lately, I've started making these same virtual spaces compatible with the Oculus Rift. That makes the experience, for sighted people, even more convincingly real, and makes their experience even more of an embodied one, since, instead of using a mouse or a keyboard to look around, they move their head and body, just as they would when looking at the real world.The reason why I started worrying about how these virtual spaces might be made accessible to the blind is that I was reminded by my university that any digital content that I make for my students should, if possible, be accessible to those with disabilities (including blindness). That's a requirement of section 508 of the Americans with Disabilities Act. I couldn't imagine how I might do that, at first, but then it struck me that the combination of spatial sounds in Unity, and the head-tracking capabilities of the Oculus Rift, might make it possible for blind students to get some sense of what was going on in my virtual architectural spaces. Over the past few months, I have been testing ways of accomplishing this goal.I have been using the Realspace 3D plug-in for Unity. It seems to work really well for spatializing sounds in the virtual world. It does employ HRTF convolution to achieve its effects. I have been using an Oculus Rift (DK2) because I have one, but a cheaper head set like the G ear VR could also work. Either one is a bit of overkill, when used by a blind person, because it's only function is to track the position of the player's head (that is, the direction the player's "gaze").I wrote a couple of simple, game-like tests, and had some blind volunteers try them out. The first just tested how well the combination of spatial sound and head-tracking worked in terms of localizing sound-emitting objects in a virtual space. I put the players in a large open plaza, and had a sound-emitting object appear somewhere in that space. The players had to locate it, relative to their bodies, and then signal to me that they had found it by turning their head to face it as accurately as they could. As soon as they were confident that they were looking directly at the object, they clicked a mouse button and another sound-emitting object appeared in a different place. This went on for a total of twelve rounds, using a variety of different sounds , with me timing how long it took to find each object. That test went really well. All the testers found every object quickly, easily, and accurately. It seemed to be as natural for them as finding sounds in the real world.The second test I did used something more like radar or sonar to scan a collection of buildings in a virtual city square. In this case, I modified the standard Unity character controller so that a ray extended away from the player's face until it hit something in its path. I attached a sound-emitting ball to that ray, and located it at the point where the ray intersected any object in front of the player. I told my testers to imagine that they had a long cane with a sound-emitting ball on the end of it, which they could extend straight ahead of them until it touched the wall of a building. They could then trace the ball along the wall of the building by turning their head to one side or the other. If the building was far away, the sound would sound far away, and if the building was close, the sound would sound close (because the sound was a spatial sound). This experiment did not work so well. As a sighted person, I imagined this would work great, but my blind testers did not find it as effective as I'd hoped. They could tell if there was a building in front of them or not, and could get some sense of whether it was close or far away, but they had trouble determining the size, shape, and orientation of buildings just on the basis of the sounds. I also found that the testers were not naturally inclined to scan their heads back and forth. The only one to do that was a tester who had lost her sight only recently.These tests were designed just to determine if I could communicate to blind users how buildings were arranged in an architectural or urban space. It did not include things like the names of buildings, or information about the buildings, or verbal instructions about where to find the buildings. Nor did it provide natural spatial sounds that might have made the spaces sound more real. All of the
Oculus Rift + 3D sound
Oculus Rift + 3D sound Hello,I'm a sighted person who uses Unity to make game-like spaces to support the teaching of ancient art and architecture. I have been experimenting with ways of making my virtual spaces accessible to the blind. More specifically, I've been testing ways of combining Unity's spatial sound with the head-tracking technology of the Rift. I have had mixed results. I wonder if there are others in this forum who are trying something similar. I've searched and found few references to Oculus. I'd appreciate hearing from anyone with experience using the Rift with Unity to produce 3D game spaces for the blind. Thanks.GlennP.S. I wouldn't mind being contacted by e-mail. URL: http://forum.audiogames.net/viewtopic.php?pid=260911#p260911 ___ Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Oculus Rift + 3D sound
Oculus Rift + 3D sound Hello,I'm a sighted person who uses Unity to make game-like spaces to support the teaching of ancient art and architecture. I have been experimenting with ways of making my virtual spaces accessible to the blind. More specifically, I've been testing ways of combining Unity's spatial sound with the head-tracking technology of the Rift. I have had mixed results. I wonder if there are others in this forum who are trying something similar. I've searched and found few references to Oculus. I'd appreciate hearing from anyone with experience using the Rift with Unity to produce 3D game spaces for the blind. Thanks.GlennP.S. I wouldn't mind being contacted by e-mail. I'll send my address to anyone who wants it. URL: http://forum.audiogames.net/viewtopic.php?pid=260911#p260911 ___ Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
