This tutorial will provide an introduction to Unity (http://www.unity3D.com) and several VR components that are designed to work with Unity. These VR components can be used in isolation or pieced together to provide fully immersive VR experiences. Unity is a feature rich multi-platform game engine for the creation of interactive 3D content. It includes an intuitive interface while at the same time allowing low-level access for developers. Thousands of assets provided by other content creators can be reused to quickly develop immersive experiences. Because of its intuitive interface, well designed architecture, and ability to easily reuse assets, 3D software can be developed in a fraction of time compared to traditional development. Consumer-level virtual-reality hardware combined with Unity have recently empowered hobbyists, professionals, and academics to quickly create virtual reality applications. Because of Unity's widespread use and ease of use, several virtual reality companies now fully support Unity. During this tutorial, participants will learn how to quickly build virtual reality applications from some of the leaders of Unity virtual reality development. Attendees will gain an understanding of how to use multiple VR components with Unity and will have enough knowledge to start building VR applications using Unity by the end of the tutorial.

We present a novel approach for wave-based sound propagation suitable for large, open spaces spanning hundreds of meters, with a small memory footprint. The scene is decomposed into disjoint rigid objects. The free-field acoustic behavior of each object is captured by a compact per-object transfer function relating the amplitudes of a set of incoming equivalent sources to outgoing equivalent sources. Pairwise acoustic interactions between objects are computed analytically to yield compact inter-object transfer functions. The global sound field accounting for all orders of interaction is computed using these transfer functions. The runtime system uses fast summation over the outgoing equivalent source amplitudes for all objects to auralize the sound field for a moving listener in real time. We demonstrate realistic acoustic effects such as diffraction, low-passed sound behind obstructions, focusing, scattering, high-order reflections, and echoes on a variety of scenes.

We present an interactive sound propagation algorithm that can compute high orders of specular and diffuse reflections as well as edge diffractions in response to moving sound sources and a moving listener. Our formulation is based on a precomputed acoustic transfer operator, which we compactly represent using the Karhunen-Loeve transform. At runtime, we use a two-pass approach that combines acoustic radiance transfer with interactive ray tracing to compute early reflections as well as higher-order reflections and late reverberation. The overall approach allows accuracy to be traded off for improved performance at runtime, and has a low memory overhead. We demonstrate the performance of our algorithm on different scenarios, including an integration of our algorithm with Valve's Source game engine.

We present an efficient algorithm for simulating diffuse reflections of sound in a static scene. Our approach is built on recent advances in precomputed light transport techniques for visual rendering and uses them to develop an improved acoustic radiance transfer technique. We precompute a direct-to-indirect acoustic transfer operator for a scene, and use it to map direct sound incident on the surfaces of the scene to multibounce diffuse indirect sound, which is gathered at the listener to compute the final impulse response. Our algorithm decouples the transfer operator from the source position so we can efficiently update the acoustic response at the listener when the source moves. We highlight its performance on various benchmarks and observe significant speedups over prior methods based on acoustic radiance transfer.

We present a novel method for tuning geometric acoustic simulations based on ray tracing. Our formulation computes sound propagation paths from source to receiver and exploits the independence of visibility tests and validation tests to dynamically guide the simulation to high accuracy and performance. Our method makes no assumptions of scene layout and can account for moving sources, receivers, and geometry. We combine our guidance algorithm with a fast GPU sound propagation system for interactive simulation. Our implementation efficiently computes early specular paths and first order diffraction with a multiview tracing algorithm. We couple our propagation simulation with an audio output system supporting a high order interpolation scheme that accounts for attenuation, cross fading, and delay. The resulting system can render acoustic spaces composed of thousands of triangles interactively.

We present an interactive algorithm and system (RESound) for sound propagation and rendering in virtual environments and media applications. RESound uses geometric propagation techniques for fast computation of propagation paths from a source to a listener and takes into account specular reflections, diffuse reflections, and edge diffraction. In order to perform fast path computation, we use a unified ray-based representation to efficiently trace discrete rays as well as volumetric ray-frusta. RESound further improves sound quality by using statistical reverberation estimation techniques. We also present an interactive audio rendering algorithm to generate spatialized audio signals. The overall approach can render sound in dynamic scenes allowing source, listener, and obstacle motion. Moreover, our algorithm is relatively easy to parallelize on multi-core systems. We demonstrate its performance on complex game-like and architectural environments.

Abstract We present an efficient technique to compute the potentially visible set (PVS) of triangles in a complex 3D scene from a viewpoint. The algorithm computes a conservative PVS at object space accuracy. Our approach traces a high number of small, volumetric frusta and computes blockers for each frustum using simple intersection tests. In practice, the algorithm can compute the PVS of CAD and scanned models composed of millions of triangles at interactive rates on a multi‐core PC. We also use the visibility algorithm to accurately compute the reflection paths from a point sound source. The resulting sound propagation algorithm is 10–20X faster than prior accurate geometric acoustic methods.

We present an interactive algorithm to compute sound propagation paths for transmission, specular reflection and edge diffraction in complex scenes. Our formulation uses an adaptive frustum representation that is automatically sub-divided to accurately compute intersections with the scene primitives. We describe a simple and fast algorithm to approximate the visible surface for each frustum and generate new frusta based on specular reflection and edge diffraction. Our approach is applicable to all triangulated models and we demonstrate its performance on architectural and outdoor models with tens or hundreds of thousands of triangles and moving objects. In practice, our algorithm can perform geometric sound propagation in complex scenes at 4-20 frames per second on a multi-core PC.

We present a new approach for simulating real-time sound propagation in complex, virtual scenes with dynamic sources and objects. Our approach combines the efficiency of interactive ray tracing with the accuracy of tracing a volumetric representation. We use a four-sided convex frustum and perform clipping and intersection tests using ray packet tracing. A simple and efficient formulation is used to compute secondary frusta and perform hierarchical traversal. We demonstrate the performance of our algorithm in an interactive system for complex environments and architectural models with tens or hundreds of thousands of triangles. Our algorithm can perform real-time simulation and rendering on a high-end PC.