CONTIGRA Audio3D

Technologies for 3D sound are widely available, but shortcomings are high programming efforts for application developers and platform dependency of various sound APIs. A solution is offered by declarative formats that describes 3D scences using scene graphs and can be interchanged between applications and platforms.
A novel declarative descripton language specialized on 3D audio was developed that allows the description of complex acoustic environments but is still suiteable for efficient realtime sound rendering with 3D sound APIs such as DirectSound 3D and OpenAL.

The format was published for the first time on the ICAD conference in July 2003 in Boston (USA). (article and conference handout as PDF-files)

Downloads

In the Downloads-section you can find a first version of an Audio3D API that implements a part of the format features (using DirectX 8 and SLAB) and a demo application that shows the usage of this API.
The API and demo implementation is done in C++ and runs under Windows 2000 and XP (other versions not tested). The source code package is available under the GPL licence and contains Visual Studio .NET 2003 project files for building the API and demo application.

Benefits of Audio3D

XML-based licence free format
can be validated with XML-Schemas in different feature levels that are easily extensible
descibes audio scene graphs strictly divided from highly detailed graphical scenes
simplification mechanisms for complex scenes enable efficient realtime rendering
orientation on 3D sound APIs that support suggested features by IASIG
Audio 3D scene graphs can be considered as components that can be configured and integrated together with graphical scenes in 3D applications using the CONTIGRA framework.