Simulated And Virtual Realities

8 Auditory virtual environments

Mark Williams

8.1 Introduction

. . .human beings enjoy an ability which has given them their most satisfactory appellation, Homo Loquens. (O’Neill, 1980)

Elsewhere in this volume one can read about the purely visual aspects of human communication which throw up their particular challenges to the virtual environment designer, but it seems unlikely that humans will exist comfortably in a synthetic environment without the availability of the ‘audio channel’. Shelley says, perhaps a little controversially, in Prometheus Unbound:

He gave man speech, and speech created thought,

Which is the measure of the Universe.

An indicator of the value of speech, if any were needed, comes from the fact that man has developed ...