Multidisciplinary engineering consultancy, Cundall, has harnessed the technology and features of the new Oculus Rift Virtual Reality headset to launch a system that enables project design teams on a new building to obtain a clear idea – before it is built – of how the acoustics will be affected by structural elements, internal, and external, noise.
Launching the Virtual Acoustic Reality (Cundall VAR) system, Cundall said: “Eschewing the flat graphic interface of traditional acoustics computer modelling, our team has combined the Oculus Rift virtual reality headset with a gaming engine and high quality audio to take clients and project design team members on an immersive audio and visual tour of a building. The ability to hear how sound changes as users move through different spaces will enable decisions to be made based on experiential factors, rather than numbers on a page.”
Users see a 3D representation of the inside of the building, including furniture, partitions, etc., simultaneously hearing whatever noise sources are input. Any development which has neighbouring sources of noise can use Cundall VAR ‘to give peace of mind to client, designer, and end-user’.
Fully portable, Cundall VAR links a powerful 3D graphics program, Unity, with the CATT Acoustic software. Users operate an X-Box controller to move forward, backward, and side to side. The Oculus Rift headset changes the direction of the virtual ‘head’, giving ‘360 degree vision’, and altering the 3D view displayed to match the user’s orientation. A preprogrammed acoustic model calculates the conditions at many locations across a grid, and the 3D ‘walkthrough’ enables users to travel across that grid, hearing – in real time – how the sound changes.
