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Whispering Mice II

• Advantages of speakers
  • Lower encumbrance
  • Richer group experience (cinema v. VCR)
  • Computationally inexpensive localization method
• Advantages of headphones
  • Minimal space requirements
  • Higher localization precision
  • No problems with echo in telephony
• Discussion...
  • Speakers: more are better
  • CAVE challenge
    • Non-ideal acoustic space for loudspeakers, but...
    • What to do about multiple headphone perspectives?
  • Another alternative: Tube phones (esp., wireless and head-tracked)
  • Futurama: F. Joseph Pompei (MIT Media Lab) ultrasonic "Audio Spotlight"
  • Taking it on the road
    • Distributed demos -> Lowest Common Denominator
    • Software v. hardware; PC v. Unix; Special-purpose v. commodity
  • Note: Latest PC 3D audio cards offer switchable headphone/speaker (2-8) output.

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