At this month’s Departmental seminar, Monday 22 May, 12.15-12.45 in 2E 3.5, we will hear from Dan Finnegan and David Sherratt:

Dan Finnegan

Title: ‘Its all Scenes & Objects’: Immersive audio rendering techniques for virtual environments

While 3D graphics have been around for a long time, they matured exponentially in the last 2 decades. A technology that is conceptually much older has matured much more slowly: 3D audio. With the advent of virtual reality content, spatial sound has rapidly become recognized as a critical component of the immersive experience. While loudspeaker arrays with panning techniques can be used to deliver high fidelity audio in carefully designed contexts, headphone display is widely appealing for its mobile and ubiquitous use. Two popular methods for headphone rendering are object based rendering and scene based rendering. In this talk, I’ll introduce both methods and give some detail on the pros and cons of each. I’ll touch on the recent MPEG-H standard for encoding spatial audio. Finally, I’ll discuss the work we’re doing comparing the two methods to develop a bespoke spatial audio solution for mobile and in-situ virtual reality content.

David Sherratt

Title: Reduction in the Lambda Calculus

In this talk I will be introducing the concept of the lambda calculus, a formal system in mathematical logic for expressing computation. I will introduce a simple virtual machine for evaluating terms in the lambda calculus, called the Krivine Machine, which performs reduction by call by name. Lastly, I will summarize how I plan to use the concepts behind this machine for my own PhD – which involves implementing a variant of the lambda calculus.

Don’t forget to check out the Departmental Seminar webpage for more information.