Audio input/output

Abstract

Networked virtual environments (NVE) are increasingly pop-ular and represent a range of applications. Some online vir-tual worlds have a dedicated purpose, such as Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOG), while others imple-ment more of foundational frameworks which are not nec-essarily applications per se, but form platforms to create applications. One of the premier examples of the latter is Second Life from Linden Lab. While such networked vir-tual environments show great potential for interesting and novel applications, many technical challenges remain. A sig-nificant shortcoming in current systems concerns the com-munication between virtual world participants. Early de-signs only supported text chat, while more recently voice chat has been introduced. However, often the voice com-munication paradigm still mimics traditional audio group conferencing without adaptation to the three-dimensional metaverse paradigm. In this study we present our design of an interactive audio streaming protocol that aims to enable the creation of an aural soundscape around the user that matches the visual experience. To make our design practi-cal, scalable and to avoid further burdening the virtual world servers, our protocol is based on a peer-to-peer distribution topology. Simulation results are presented that show the feasibility and utility of our design