The World Wide Web provides new opportunities for distance education over the Internet. The Web when combined with other network tools can be used to create a virtual classroom to bring together a community of learners for interactive education. The specific issue addressed here is tailoring specific functionality to allow a group of instructors and students to carry out the learning process in...

There is abundant literature regarding virtual reality as a technology of interest in the present age. However, there are few comprehensive studies on strategies that can improve the level of urban design research using this technique. To investigate the issue, this paper first reviews the concept of virtual reality. Next, the opinions of experts in the field of virtual reality technology are s...

In this paper high-quality model-based sound synthesis of plucked string and woodwind instruments is combined with room simulation and auralization techniques. The result is a real-time virtual three-dimensional room where the listener and multiple virtual instruments can be moved. The system was designed using signal processors in a multiprocessing environment. Sound radiation patterns of musi...

The perceived spatial spread of amplitude panned virtual sources is dependent on the number of loudspeakers that are used to produce them. When pair-wise or triplet-wise panning is applied, the number of active loudspeakers varies as a function of the panning direction. This may cause unwanted changes in spatial spread and coloration of a virtual source if it is moved in the sound stage. In thi...

The nonverbal behaviors of conversational partners reflect their conversational footing, signaling who in the group are the speakers, addressees, bystanders, and overhearers. Many applications of virtual reality (VR) will involve multiparty conversations with virtual agents and avatars of others where appropriate signaling of footing will be critical. In this paper, we introduce computational m...

This paper presents an interactive real-time augmented reality system with realistic illumination of integrated virtual objects. A marker and a mirror sphere are placed in a scene that is captured by a video camera. Dynamic illumination (as the marker is interactively moved) is estimated from the video signal and used for realistic real-time integration of virtual objects into the video. To ach...

Virtual audio reality environments have in recent years become popular in such fields as computer music, acoustics, multimedia, and telecommunications [1]. There are often computational constraints that lead to very simplified systems that faintly resemble the physical reality. We present a distributed expandable virtual audio reality system that can accurately yet efficiently model room acoust...

This study examines the potential role of the auditory spectral integration in phonetic vowel quality decisions. Synthetic stimuli included a “virtual formant (F2)” which was produced by inserting two pairs of sine waves below and above a “perceptual target frequency” (the spectral center-of-gravity, COG). Intensity weighting across the pairs of sine waves created a virtual F2, i.e., an F2 perc...