April 5, 2014, NAB, Las Vegas—Chris Cookson from Innovative Technologies talked about the possibilities for cinema in the future. The rapidly changing technology landscape is opening many avenues for filmmakers to apply their craft in new ways. Before starting on prognosticating, Cookson reviewed the past 50 years. In ’64 there were many changes happening, and…
March 26, 2014, GPU Technology Conference, San Jose, CA—Zoufu Cheng from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champagne talked about making the audio as good as the video in games. The ability of the GPUs to process rays can be applied to acoustics as well as to the images to provide a more immersive game experience….
February 3, 2014, Electronic Imaging Conference, San Francisco—Nick Holliman from the University of York and Jonathan Berry from Durham University talked about enhancing 3-D depth perception with audible cues. This work reflects the relative lack of depth, about +/-20 cm from the surface of the screen on a television. Although people are known to respond…
January 24, 2014, National Association of Music Merchants, Anaheim—Marshall Electronics and their MXL division designed and operated the custom streaming broadcast solution from the GoPro stage at NAMM. Marshall provided its live streaming equipment and expertise to stream performances in real time to the NAMM website with their StreamVu products and to the local large…
November 12, 2013, AMD Developer Summit, San Jose, CA—Laurent Betbeder from Sony outlined the considerations for the latest console. The game audio system addresses the need for clean audio within the games. The consoles are moving towards more PC hardware to take advantage of the greater need for performance and lower costs. The major difference…
November 13, 2013, AMD Developer Summit, San Jose, CA—Jerry Mahbub from Gen Audio Sound has evolved from monophonic, to stereo, to various surround, mostly now at 5.1 audio channels. Some new experimental systems are going to 11.1, 13.1, and even 22.3, and use very complex mixing tools and hardware to get to their spatial sound…
August 1, 2013, Independent Game Developers Association Summit, San Francisco-Thomas Bartschi from IO Interactive described learnings, both positive and negative, of the audio design for the Hitman: Absolution game. The insights and explanations for their choices and the closed-loop changes in critical game design that affected audio and the game. The audio production had many…
July 2013 – At Siggraph 2013, the emerging technologies area had more than just video and graphics. It featured audio and 3D in multiple forms. On the audio side, the Univ of AZ was showing a percussion system that used actuators that mounted on real drums and cymbals and were driven by a Raspberry Pi…
June 18, 2013, Entertainment Technology in the Internet Age, SPMTE and SCIEN conference, Stanford, CA—A panel took on the topic of future file formats and the trends and implications for Web distribution. Howard Lukk from Walt Disney Studios chaired the presentations. Speakers were Pierre Lemiuex from Sandflow consulting and John Hurst from Cinecert. Lukk opened…