Splash, Splatter, Sploosh, and Bloop!

Acoustic Bubble writes "Researchers at Cornell University have developed the first algorithm for synthesizing familiar bubble-based fluid sounds automatically from 3D fluid simulations, e.g, for future virtual environments. The research (entitled 'Harmonic Fluids') will appear at ACM SIGGRAPH 2009 in New Orleans in August 2009. Check out some videos of falling, pouring, splashing and babbling water simulations (computed on a Linux cluster)."

Graphical Adventures

[Celeste R]

This is a simulation physicist's wet dream, and I'm sure it'll be somewhere in a graphical adventure soon.

My bet is that the FPS genre will like this too.

How long until this is realtime?

[Sowelu]

I want a simulation program where I can move around rocks and pools and have a water hose. Used to do this all the time in the backyard as a kid, it would be nice to do it without getting wet or wasting water. Wonder how long until this is realtime? My kids, of course, won't get to play with it. They need to play in the REAL backyard.

Can they

[schrodingers_rabbit]

simulate real systems yet, or just computer-generated ones? Better simulations of the relationships between fluid and sound would be fascinating if applied to superfluids (Ahhh, the soothing sound of superhot plasma).

The simulation sounded muffled.

[Ungrounded Lightning]

The simulation sounded somewhat muffled, like the high frequency components weren't right or weren't of sufficient amplitude.

Can some of the rest of you listen and tell me if it sounds muffled to you too? (I want to be sure it's not my machine or earphones.)

Might be the CODEC used with flash rather than the original simulation itself...

Re:Hmm.

[beadfulthings]

I'm pretty stodgy. All I could think of was the Brownian motion poem:

Big whorls have little whorls
Which feed on their velocity.
And little whorls have lesser whorls,
And so on to viscosity...

Procedural generation

[ledow]

Looks like PC gaming is likely to be heading more and more towards procedural generation of the universe. Real-time shadows, dynamic lighting and now, dynamic sounds.

It'll all make it more realistic (but at a high CPU cost!) - being able to not have "splish, splosh, splish, splosh" when wading through water but a full-on sound relative to individual parts - bullet shells, limbs, objects in the water, etc. We won't see it *practically* for years, but gaming is getting closer and closer to that dream of "virtual reality", where you won't be able to tell the difference between a real scene and a computer generated one without touching it.

I think you can make uses of it in gaming too, extending the basic science to a consumer level - skim stones across water that sound like they're being skimmed (and with proper fluid physics similar to that which we already have, individual sploshes and waves etc. affecting that stone) - or be able to throw a coin into water behind an enemy and see if you can use it to distract him. Maybe even, the bubbles that you breath underwater hitting the surface with their true sounds, thus giving your position away if you were hoping that holding your breath would let that enemy walk past you without hearing you.

When you play games, you don't notice the "cheats" at first - the static sounds that just play on certain events, the pre-lit textures, the echoing of sounds generated inside a certain fixed area. Even in things like HL2, boxes thrown into water either splosh or don't, splosh based on certain primitive criteria that provide a few levels of believability. But as new technology comes along to make it possible to actually *create* that effect rather than script it, everything suddenly feels much more alive.

Dynamic sound has to be one of the next "big" areas - hitting a wall with an axe in a game used to give "Doink", then it gave a selection of "Doink, Donk, Doink, Donk" sounds each time. Moving forwards, the only way is to actually determine exact angles, shapes of the wall (proper destructible objects for everything are, sadly, still only a dream) and to generate a simulation of the sound it would produce (how cool would it be that if you strike the axe slightly off, you get a reverberating axe coming back at you, with a horrible sound that tells you not to do it?. Maybe even with the axe breaking on a critical point if you mis-use it too much, e.g. try and chop at a steel wall).

We already have proper echoing and other effects available and 7.1 surround can take away the whole "Where the hell did that come from?" effect if it's too clinically applied. But having sounds *generated* by the interactions within an environment... wow. Imagine Left4Dead-style atmosphere, but with proper echo effects... you walk towards a corner and from around it, a zombie stumbles into a puddle - suddenly the sound not only tells you there's something near, but the echoes from the corners confuse just as in real life, and the sound is only the tiniest little splish, and it may even be possible to determine the *type* of zombie around the corner by the type of splash it makes - something with a large flat foot would create an enormous popping bubble of a sound, something with stick-like appendages would generate barely a ripple.

This will have a small but critical effect on gaming and, I imagine, a million other uses. But we're *years* away from seeing it used.