Enhancing sound description in VRML

Sounds in VRML are spatialized (i.e. located in space) but no room effects can be described to make them more realistic. In this paper we present a solution we have implemented for extending the simple sound management within a VRML browser. The first aspect is the description of sound related materials in VRML format using new nodes and fields. We describe the different elements we have introduced for dealing with a 3D perceptual sound simulator. Those adjunctions were made by looking at the likeness and differences of the description and the computation of 3D visual and 3D audio worlds. It appears that only one type of sound source is needed as well as some material properties for the polygons. These material attributes for sounds are added in order to achieve some simple occlusion effects. The second aspect is the implementation of this audio-enhanced VRML browser. We present the tool we have implemented to evaluate this work.