This study explored the hypothesis that students using virtual reality (VR) education tools learn more effectively and efficiently when compared to conventional teaching methods. We investigated the specific situation of a course in digital logic design, and the task of simplifying Karnaugh maps. The students using VR observed the Karnaugh map as a higher-dimensional structure, while the students in the control group used a traditional pen-and-paper method. The 15 participants in the trial were administered either the VR education mechanism or the traditional education mechanism. Participants were asked to report their perceived level of comfort with various levels of solving K-maps. Preliminary results demonstrated that participants assigned to the VR test groups reported an increased level of understanding of Karnaugh maps after the trial. Further, participants using a desktop based headset were able to complete the experience quicker on average than the group using a phone based headset.

In this paper we discuss the use of sound spatialization in western classical music and attempt to explain a potential reason why it is not found in current popular music. We argue that the barriers limiting the use of musical sound spatialization are nearly gone and attempt to facilitate the return by providing a computer interface for musical spatialization. The interface is described in detail and is briefly compared to the few currently available interfaces. The paper focuses on real-time sound spatialization and includes a discussion of real-time spatialization versus spatial choreography.

Human speech and song seem disparate, but a range of utterances between speech and song are evident, such as poetry, chant, and rap, which have features of both singing and speaking. This work seeks to identify and characterize the perceptual features relevant for a fuzzy classification of utterances between speech and singing. The speech-ness or song-ness of an utterance depends on the speech or song features evident in that utterance. This paper presents a brief discussion of the collection and annotation of the corpus of sound clips used in this work, followed by a description of the perceptual features expected to be useful, and presentation of preliminary results for two of these features.