NCSA Audio Development Group

"Navigating" is more than finding a convenient place to park or identifying the shortest line in the supermarket. Likewise in cyberspace, navigating is more than finding a convenient place to login or reading your favorite newsgroups. "Navigating" where information space is concerned may be considered a search for meaningful relations among information and the states of actively evolving systems.

There are many kinds of navigation where audio plays an important role. Taking a walk in our analog world we see and hear our surroundings. We may not realize we are actively listening until an unusual sound grabs our attention or someone calls our name, or we hear a sound that reminds us of that old car our uncle use to drive.

Memorable sounds make our world meaningful and help us to find our way among the environment, our memories, and our perception of the present. New sounds can help us to describe and understand new encounters.

Click on the icons below to learn about some of our projects. You get optimum results if you stop the background sound first.

At SIGGRAPH 95 we presented audio navigation tools for the information space of the Interactive Communities.

Other projects in the NCSA Audio Group:

Navigate the state space of a simulated chaotic system, and see and hear the results.

Sounds can be used to describe topological complexity as you travel through a structured set of points.

Data-driven sound experiments have also been composed purely for fun and art.

If you are using an SGI with IRIX 5.0 or later, you may have been listening to our automated environment since you entered our audio space. These sounds are not pre-recorded, they are synthesized and rendered in real-time. Here you can learn more about the NCSA Sound Server and other software audio tools and techniques.

The Audio Development Group at NCSA, part of the Virtual Environments Group.

(Left to right) Insook Choi, Ulrike Axen, Kelly Fitz and Robin Bargar (seated), Camille Goudeseune, NCSA/UIUC, and Sumit Das, EVL/UIC. Not pictured: Bryan Holloway, Carlos Ricci. (Photo by Thompson-McClellan Photography)

We live in the CAVE and the Numerical Lab.

To Index Alive Dreams and Illusions CitySpace