ICE - Immersive Communication Environment

Introduction to ICE

ICE (Immersive Communication Environment) provides surround sound voice communication linked to virtual environments.

ICE takes into account the relative angle and distance of the speakers in relation to the listener as well as the location of walls and other audio barriers when rendering a scene for each participant.

The participants each receive a personalized surround-sound audio scene that contains all of the speaking avatars (avatars are the virtual representations of other participants in the game) in hearing range.

The voice scene is rendered using either 5.1 speakers (for this we need to use echo cancellation) or virtual 3D sound rendering in headphones (HTRF).

While the listener hears all avatars within hearing range - we do not send all those individual streams - we simplify the scene in the server and have a maximum cap on the download bandwidth required for clients even in crowded areas.

The main technical advantages of ICE include being able to provide voice scenes even for crowded scenes (with many people within hearing range) over consumer broadband connections. We use client server delivery architecture to create these voice scenes and can support close to 1000 people per server.

Request a demonstration

'Send an email with your details to ice@smartinternet.com.au to request a demonstration.

Target Markets

The most natural "fits" for ICE are applications where either:

• There is a strong sense of virtual space and the addition of spatially-linked sound would enhance the user experience, or
• an audio-intensive application would benefit from the introduction of a sense of space - for example, to differentiate between different speakers.

The first applications that were ICE enabled were games - this environment is the most technically challenging since they can have many players, fast movement in the virtual world and very complex walls.

We have been able to test the service extensively by attaching it to first person shooters such as Counter-Strike Source and Wolfenstein-Enemy Territory.

Telstra (Australia's largest Carrier and ISP) is currently running trials of ICE enabled Wolfenstein Enemy-Territory and Counter-Strike source with customers connected to their ADSL network in Launceston, Tasmania.

We are getting very enthusiastic feedback from the players. In particular with the addition of ICE to Wolfenstein Enemy-Territory the players are saying that it has added a whole new dimension to the game.

A surging area of growth is online communication in the corporate area, often framed around the need to develop or review online information resources - documents, spreadsheets, project plans and the like. Most of the applications in this market feature very rudimentary audio support .... and for participants who can't immediately recognise the voices of other participants, it can be very difficult to recognise who's who. ICE can enhance the experience in two key ways - firstly, by allowing the voice stream from different participants to come from different "directions" (to enhance recognition) and secondly, by supporting real-world activities like "side discussions" (where a subgroup engages in a discussion whilst still hearing, and in hearing range of, the main discussion).

In contrast to the corporate communications market, busy online chat rooms frequently host numerous individual discussion threads between subgroups of those connected to the chat session. It can be very difficult for a new entrant to the room to identify the different threads and tune into a discussion of interest. The situation is not unlike entering a crowded party where many small groups are engaged in individual discussion. In the real world, the new entrant wanders around, listens discretely to what's being discussed in particular groups, and eventually joins a group of interest. ICE can support exactly the same communication dynamically, by organising the many threads into spatial clusters. The potential exists to re-engineer chat forums to be more dynamic, more engaging and more meaningful adjuncts to web-sites.

Features

The main features of the ICE Client/Servers are:

• Enabled Communication in Crowds: ICE provides surround sound voice scenes based upon the location of other people in the virtual environment.
• Virtual Walls Attenuate Sound: ICE takes into account complex walls in the virtual environment based upon a simple wall file format. Sound can be attenuated by walls depending upon their material type.
• Fixed Peak Downstream Bandwidth for Clients Even in Virtual Crowds: A Fixed peak bandwidth is required by ICE clients no-matter how many people are contributing real-time voices to the audio-scene. The fixed maximum bandwidth varies from 16kbps to 128kbps depending upon complexity of codec used.
• Low Average Downstream Bandwidth: <