Engineering topics

Miller, Joel D.

Publications and source records attributed to Miller, Joel D..

3 records

NASA NTRS2010

Applying Spatial Audio to Human Interfaces: 25 Years of NASA Experience

From the perspective of human factors engineering, the inclusion of spatial audio within a human-machine interface is advantageous from several perspectives. Demonstrated benefits include the ability to monitor multiple streams of speech and non-speech warning tones using a cocktail party advantage, and for aurally-guided visual search. Other potential benefits include the spatial coordination and interaction of multimodal events, and evaluation of new communication technologies and alerting systems using virtual simulation. Many of these technologies were developed at NASA Ames Research Center, beginning in 1985. This paper reviews examples and describes the advantages of spatial sound in NASA-related technologies, including space operations, aeronautics, and search and rescue. The work has involved hardware and software development as well as basic and applied research.

Begault, Durand R.↗

NASA NTRS2008

Reconfigurable Auditory-Visual Display

System and method for visual and audible communication between a central operator and N mobile communicators (N greater than or equal to 2), including an operator transceiver and interface, configured to receive and display, for the operator, visually perceptible and audibly perceptible signals from each of the mobile communicators. The interface (1) presents an audible signal from each communicator as if the audible signal is received from a different location relative to the operator and (2) allows the operator to select, to assign priority to, and to display, the visual signals and the audible signals received from a specified communicator. Each communicator has an associated signal transmitter that is configured to transmit at least one of the visual signals and the audio signal associated with the communicator, where at least one of the signal transmitters includes at least one sensor that senses and transmits a sensor value representing a selected environmental or physiological parameter associated with the communicator.

Begault, Durand R.↗

NASA NTRS2003

Software for Acoustic Rendering

SLAB is a software system that can be run on a personal computer to simulate an acoustic environment in real time. SLAB was developed to enable computational experimentation in which one can exert low-level control over a variety of signal-processing parameters, related to spatialization, for conducting psychoacoustic studies. Among the parameters that can be manipulated are the number and position of reflections, the fidelity (that is, the number of taps in finite-impulse-response filters), the system latency, and the update rate of the filters. Another goal in the development of SLAB was to provide an inexpensive means of dynamic synthesis of virtual audio over headphones, without need for special-purpose signal-processing hardware. SLAB has a modular, object-oriented design that affords the flexibility and extensibility needed to accommodate a variety of computational experiments and signal-flow structures. SLAB s spatial renderer has a fixed signal-flow architecture corresponding to a set of parallel signal paths from each source to a listener. This fixed architecture can be regarded as a compromise that optimizes efficiency at the expense of complete flexibility. Such a compromise is necessary, given the design goal of enabling computational psychoacoustic experimentation on inexpensive personal computers.

Miller, Joel D.↗