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FocalPoint
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1992-04-24
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********************************ANNOUNCING***********************************
FOCAL POINT(tm)
3D Audio For The Macintosh II
FOCAL POINT brings directional binaural sound to the Macintosh. Multiple
sounds or audio icons come from anywhere around the listener, localized and
animated in real time. Sounds come from Macintosh soundfiles, synthesizers,
or outside sound sources.
FOCAL POINT is an INIT for the Macintosh. It goes in the System Folder, uses
about fifty kbytes of memory, and creates a group of new function calls similar
to Toolbox calls which provide system-wide access to 3D sound. Each 3D sound
channel requires one Digidesign Audiomedia card, up to as many as you want to
install.
On startup, FOCAL POINT DSP code loads into the Audiomedia's Motorola 56001
processor. Spatial audio processing then goes on independent of the Macintosh.
Applications or INITs using 3D sound don't slow down.
Using FOCAL POINT, you can quickly
-create a multi-object spatial audio display system
-create a spatial audio interface for the visually impaired
-create a many-voice teleconferencing system
-create the audio equivalent of the Graphical User Interface
-use directional audio icons to declutter the graphical screen
-use directional audio as a navigation tool in your application
-create MIDI-driven 3D sound objects
-create 3D sound edits with Soundtools, Audiomedia, and other editors
-add 3D sound to your multimedia presentations
Some of these uses can be demonstrated right away by simply turning on audio
mouse pointing in the FOCAL POINT Control Panel. FOCAL POINT will work while
you're running a related application or INIT which produces its own sounds.
FOCAL POINT's output is two channels just like stereo but with spatial
information built into the signals. It's equalized for headphones but for
some applications, particularly sound editing, loudspeakers work too.
FOCAL POINT convolves the audio signal with head-related transfer functions
to generate binaural outputs for the left and right ears. Transfer functions
are computed in the Motorola 56001 processor, not the Macintosh. Audio is
44.1 KHz, 16 bit CD quality.
Adding FOCAL POINT 3D audio to an application is easy. There are only two
main calls, Init3D() and Set3D(). They act like part of the Toolbox and can
be called from any programming environment. Init3D(Ptr channel) is called once.
It installs FOCAL POINT 3D code in the DSP and returns a pointer to the channel
if an Audiomedia card is available. Set3D(Ptr channel,int az,int el,int dist)
changes a sound's location. Its arguments are channel, azimuth, elevation, and
distance. Set3D() is fast and can be updated in the main event loop without
waiting around.
Sample applications which support headtracking and RS232 host functions come
with FOCAL POINT. Also included are the THINK C library objects for these
extra functions so programmers can use them to build new applications.
FOCAL POINT is available for quantity licensing. The FOCAL POINT 3D DSP code
also quickly ports to other platforms with the Motorola 56001 processor.
PRICES
FOCAL POINT INIT and software package, per channel $295.00
Digidesign Audiomedia card with required modification at no cost $995.00
________
COST PER CHANNEL $1290.00
Customer-supplied Digidesign Audiomedia cards can be modified and tested for
$245.00 each. Shipping is additional.
Order FOCAL POINT from:
BO GEHRING
318 W. Galer Street
Seattle, WA 98119
206-286-8922
gehring@dgp.toronto.edu
FOCAL POINT is a trademark of Bo Gehring
Audiomedia and Soundtools are trademarks of Digidesign Inc.
THINK C is a trademark of Symantec Corporation
Macintosh is a trademark of Apple Computer Inc.
=================
Date: 25 Oct 91 01:39:07 EDT
>[MODERATOR'S NOTE: I sent Tim the general info we have on citations, but
>if someone can send to him or us (Mark and me) the current information for
>Crystal River Engineering and Gehring Inc. (Focal Point), as well as any
>other 3D sound systems, we can include the info in a FAQ. Thanks. -- Bob
>Jacobson]
Bo came to Boston in August, 91. I invited him to give the 2nd half of a VR
lecture that I gave for the Greater Boston SIGCHI group. We stayed up til very
late talking about the old days of SigGraph, etc. What a neat guy!
His company, Focal Point sells a board with some of his software on it.
The input to the board is 1 mono analog audio channel and x,y,and z position
for the output. The output is 2 analog audio channels that effectively place
the sound at the specified location for the headphone wearer. The output can
also be applied to speakers and does surprisingly well, though I was much more
interested in headphone use.
The board is a slightly modified Audiomedia card made by Digidesign.
It plugs into the Macintosh nubus. It contains the Motorola 56001 DSP chip
and CD quality A to D conversion and D to A conversion. One of the most
impressive demos I listened to was simply feeding 1 channel of a CD player and
the mouse position [just x and y] into the board. The correspondence between
the position of the mouse and the location of the sound was very clear. His
software allows you to make a large virtual screen so that the mouse can
indicate positions quite far from the actual physical screen.
[I wish visual virtual screens were this cheap!]
You can also control the position via RS232 or MIDI. Bo supplies some Think C
routines so that you can control the sound via your own programs. The updating
of position parameters can be fast and glitch-free, though it doesn't do
dopler shifting. Each card can only control the position of 1 input channel at
a time. It also does not do any reverb, an important environmental cue. [You
can, however, reverb the input channel before it enters the card, or even
reberb each output channel with off-the-shelf hardware.] Bo's distance cue was
simply volume, which is realistic for wide open spaces but not interiors or
inner cities. For close sounds [several feet], not doing any reberb is just
fine.
The last verson of the Convolvotron that I heard [at VPL, March, 91] could do
4 channels in real time and had programmable reverb for each channel. Note
that my listening to each was several months apart so its difficult for me to
even state a decent subjective impression of the difference in localization
quality amonst the two. The Convolotron has one H*ll of a lot more compute
power [300 MIPS as I recall] in it than the single 56001 in Bo's system. Bo
has come up with a particularly clever algorithm and gets away with much less
processing power.
Perhaps the most dramatic difference between the two for the end user is
price. The Audiomedia board costs about $1K and the software an additional
$500 [August 91 prices]. Four of them would cost you $6K. The Convolovtron
costs something like $20K [March 91 prices, may well have fallen since].
Contacts for Bo:
318 W. Galer St., Seattle, WA 98119
But phone or fax him in Toronto 416 963-9188
Internet: gehring@dgp.toronto.edu