AMU Preview 1

If you haven't been paying attention, we'll repeat the news:

Andromeda Media Universe Preview 1 is slated for release to the Beta Team on June 1st, 2008.

That being said, we're trying to meet the deadline as best as possible. There are a few setbacks here and there as we march ever closer to deadline. One of which happened to be dealing with the atmospherics and haze for the planet. Another issue that seems to be coming up is related to various sub-systems as we bring them online.

Some things simply do not want to play well with others, but we are still bringing them together to work as a well connected team of features. That being said, June 1st is simply a Preview Release, so while the system has many amazing things built into it, keep in mind that much of it will not be enabled for the first preview release until we can make absolutely certain that it is stable and working. That is why we have a beta team in the first place :P

On another completely unrelated note -

It has come to our attention that the server this is hosted on is located in Amsterdam. We have no idea why this bit of information amuses us, but we'll figure it out eventually.

*Edit: It was just brought to our attention after this, that the reason it is so amusing that this server is located in Amsterdam is because in Amsterdam, marijuana is completely legal. This being said, every time this server goes down, it's actually just too stoned to serve you the pages. Yes, even as corporate people, we at AMU are still laid back enough to joke.

Meanwhile...

A Town Hall Meeting has been scheduled for all Beta Team members. The email went out this morning informing everyone of the time (1PM EST), Date (Saturday, May 31st 2008) and Location.

If you have yet to participate in the Beta Team, and do not make any effort to let us know you wish to remain on the team, after June 1st 2008 you will be removed from the beta team going forward.

Just a friendly reminder.

- Andromeda Development Team

Random Site Outages

One of the reasons we originally opted not to get a domain attached to this project was that we had a sneaking suspicion that after we did, we would begin to get slammed with traffic from around the world.

While the servers usually adjust automatically, sometimes it takes about 15 or twenty minutes for that to happen as our site is hit by the onslaught of visitors. During that time, you may experience slow downs or time outs when trying to load Andromeda3D.com

We are well aware of this, and the best answer we can give at this time is to be patient and try again in 15 minutes. Believe it or not, the bandwidth for our server is actually astronomically high so it is to be expected that a random hiccup here and there will occur that will disrupt access.

We're looking into another server for a later date that has what we have termed "an insanity bandwidth clause" - meaning in the very high Terabytes of traffic. So for the time being please be patient as we do what we can to accommodate all of our new visitors.

Thank you for your patience and understanding,

- Andromeda Project Team

All Clear

Forums are back online. Thank you for your patience.

Forums Down

The forums are currently down, assuming for maintenance. We are working on getting them restored and back online as quickly as possible.

Thank you for your patience

- The Management

Formation for Transformation: It begins with me...

At Connections we are moving in a direction that can perhaps be summed up with the phrase formation for transformation. Being a church can easily be, if we let it, all about programs and activities. These might even be “successful” programs and activities, in terms of participation or some other measure. But in the end our faithfulness and success will not be measured in terms of how busy or how active we are, but in terms of how closely we follow God's Spirit at work in the church and in the world

And so, in a previous article, we looked at how we are to have a shape that emphasises “the spiritual growth of Christians [formation] and the finding of spiritual life by those who have not yet encountered Christ [transformation].”

There is a yearning in the world for spiritual life and spiritual maturity. People have a need for salvation – a restored relationship with God their Creator – but this fact has a richness that is often ignored.

The riches of salvation is wholeness, a maturity, or what theologians sometimes call sanctification, in God – an overcoming of not just the fact of sin, but something of its effect in our lives.

We are all aware of the power of sin as it shows up in hurts, guilts, shames, addictions, weaknesses, and wounded emotions, relationships, and personalities. The gospel offers not only a firm foundation, a grace-filled reconciliation that sets us lovingly in the arms of God, but a richness that works itself out as an ongoing formational work of God in our lives. This formation isn't a “quick-fix” but a dealing with the worldly and fleshly things so that we grow into a wholeness and a maturity - we become more and more like Jesus.

I love how Paul, when writing to the Philippians, immediately after the section where he exhorts them - “Your attitude should be the same as that of Christ Jesus” gives his readers this:

“Therefore, my dear friends, as you have always obeyed... continue to work out your salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God who works in you to will and to act according to his good purpose.” (Phil 2:12-13, emphasis added)

And so as a church we understand that God is at work in us, to form us, and to spiritually grow us – but we are not absent from the process. We are called to work – to put energy and effort into applying God's truth to the difficulties and manifestations of a broken world that make up our lives.

This is something we are to take seriously. A book I am reading at present (and I will review soon on my other blog) portrays a sadly-all-too-true picture of what church is often like:

“The sad truth is that too little difference exists, in terms of emotional and relational maturity, between God's people inside the church and those outside who claim no relationship to Jesus Christ. Even more alarming, when you go beyond the praise and worship of our large meetings and conventions and into the home and small-group meetings of God's people, you often find a valley littered by broken and failed relationships.”[1]

Returning to the Bible, James is quite blunt about it, speaking to the church:

Submit yourselves, then, to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you. Come near to God and he will come near to you. Wash your hands, you sinners, and purify your hearts, you double-minded. Grieve, mourn and wail. Change your laughter to mourning and your joy to gloom. Humble yourselves before the Lord, and he will lift you up.” (James 4:7-10)

Each one of us is called to respondto the grace by which Christ saves us and takes responsibility for our sin. We are in charge of how we respond to God. In other words - Your response to God's grace is your responsibility in the end. Work out your salvation with fear and trembling for it is God who works in you, forming you: In the light of God's love, and moved by his Spirit, deal with your issues, overcome the weaknesses, repent of the sins, adjust your paths, live by the truth – be broken, fixed, healed, adjusted: be formed.

God loves us, saves us – and so we respond. Peter Scazzero reminds us - “A revelation of God's free grace gives us the courage to face the painful truth about ourselves. As we step out onto the tightrope of discovering the unpleasant things about ourselves, we have a safety net below – the Gospel of Jesus Christ.”[2]

We are called to have formation for transformation at our heart. Whatever activities and programs we run (and we are currently exploring a few) the aim is to foster and assist this formation – to encourage, exhort and empower people to step up to the plate and respond to God's grace.

[1] Peter Scazzero with Warren Bird, The Emotionally Healthy Church, p17. Also sold in Australia.

[2] Scazzero, p83

May 2008 Prayer Points

Prayer points that have gone out on our "missionpray" mailing list. If you want to receive these prayer point emails please contact me.

Thankyou once again for your support in praying for Connections. The season we are in is an interesting one. In many ways we are building up to the "next wave" of how we push ahead with the work of the Kingdom in the Somerset region - and this means we need to be well-founded, and well-aligned with God's purposes.
Here are some prayer points that pertain to our current season, in no particular order:

• Please pray for spiritual growth in our congregation. This is always a good thing to pray! But in a season of significant planning it is particularly important. Please pray for us in the sense of Paul's exhortation to the Philippians in 2:12-13 that we might heed the call to "continue to work out your salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God who works in you to will and to act according to his good purpose." Pray for courage for us to face the weaknesses, sins, and worldly patterns in our lives and find resolution of them in the Spirit of Christ.
• Please pray for the "fact-finding" part of our season. We have some of our number going to Melbourne to explore the opportunities provided by a conference there. There are other avenues to explore - all with the aim of finding the best way to implement a culture of spiritual growth and substantial outreach.
• Please pray for some who are beginning new aspects of ministry - preaching, service leading, music ministry, and more. Praise God for people willing to step out and "have a go." Particular thanks for the Saturday night musicians small group and the consequent increase (in all aspects) of our music team.
• Please pray for the rising up of people into some key positions. In particular, pray for our KLT (Kids Learning Time) and children's ministry leadership. Please pray as we look to begin a youth ministry - for enthusiasm, paperwork and funding opportunities, and people to be inspired.
• Please pray for our leadership as we seek God's wisdom in this season. Pray for Bp. Ross as he has returned from Long Service Leave and is into the thick of things.
• Please pray for those who will be sharing their testimony of spiritual growth over the next few weeks in our Sunday gatherings.
• Please pray for our small groups, and thank God for the young adults group that is coming together well.
• Please pray once again as we look to change venue. It seems our current venue will be sold by its owners. This is an opportunity to be positioned well and we are approaching local schools etc. Please pray for opportunities to eventuate at the right time.
• And finally, please pray for the Synod of the Diocese of Tasmania as it meets this weekend - please pray for myself and Jonathan who are the synods people at Connections.

Something About Nothing

There is this general feeling I get when I think about the vast expanse of nothingness that is the universe. Sure there is a whole lot of something in there, but on the whole it is separated by larger expanses of nothing.

Unlike you see in science fiction, space is a pretty dark place or so it would seem. When on the surface of a planet, you can see the stars at night and in rural areas this must seem like an overwhelming sight to behold as the vast expanses of the heavens unfold over your head.

Lately I've been pondering whether or not when you actually get into space, if that same sort of overwhelming aspect of a starscape is still there. From videos I've seen from NASA, it is a very different picture when you are actually in space itself or even on the moon. The moon footage is eerily devoid of stars in the lunar sky except maybe the Earth itself as it rises over the horizon.

It is also possible that these circumstances are simply not on par and due to other circumstances that I have yet to uncover.

In other news -

Andromeda Media Universe now has a registered domain name for easy access. Pointing your browser to http://www.andromeda3d.com will take you to this now very public project page. Along with this update included such things as adding text links at the bottom of every page to accommodate browsers with flash disabled. Also a new sitemap was created and submitted to Google proper, so now the behemoth of a search engine will start indexing this site.

You will no longer be able to simply bookmark individual pages on the site, including the beta section. This is for relative security reasons, and also because we would like to keep the address bar simple and clean. As for the Beta Section, the entire area was recoded from scratch in order to work the same across all browsers (to our knowledge). So Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari, Opera and others should see the beta section the same way.

This also includes getting the nice clock in the bottom right corner to finally work cross-browser as well. Added google search to the beta section, and also a log out button on the task bar which will return you to the main site. Cleaned up the login and password boxes making them rounded and stylized.

As of this posting, the countdown until First Preview of the AMU platform is about 13 days away. Lots of things going on between now and then as we gear up for D-Day. For the time being, we have also set up a new Forum for the site, but are using this one as a test run before we determine if we would like to finalize it at a later time. The address for that is -

http://www.andromeda3d.com/forums

Please take the time to register and post an introduction profile. The forums are moderated, so please keep that in mind. If you post something inappropriate, you will be banned.

Other than that, I bet you can't wait to see the preview, can you? We'll keep you posted as we make updates and changes. Until then, why not subscribe to this blog and have it send to your email when we make updates?

Till next time,

William Burns
Project Leader
Andromeda Media Universe
http://www.Andromeda3D.com

Meme time

I got tagged by Lynn Jones on this one:

The requirements are as follows:
1. Pick up the nearest book.
2. Open to page 123.
3. Locate the fifth sentence.
4. Post the next three sentences on your blog and in so doing…
5. Tag five people, and acknowledge who tagged you.


Setting up a narrow range of choices, then, should always be a part of your deceptions. The following are among the most common forms of “controlling the options: Colour the choices. This was a favourite technique of Henry Kissinger

-The Concise 48 Laws of Power by Robert Greene

I'm going to tag:
Richard
Sanji
Charlee
Lara
and Rachel

The Countdown Continues

With only 19 days left before the beta release of Andromeda Media Universe, things here are speeding up in development.

The server structure is completed, world server is finalized, and we've been working on the front end for the past few weeks. Over the past few days we've been obsessing over how to make the sun look as realistic as possible from the ground and we've learned a lot along the way.

One thing we've learned is that the color of the sky is altered by the atmosphere itself. We realized this about two days into working on the sun while trying to match the look and feel from a photograph. We were aware that the atmosphere played a part, but weren't entirely aware of how much of a part it would play until we began having issues matching the RGB for the sky gradient.

We were taking direct RGB samples from the photograph itself, and yet the same RGB colors weren't matching in the environment settings. So after a looking into things, we realized that the atmospheric scattering in the browser was actually working and doing it's job as coded, thusly altering the color of the sky based on intensity of the haze.

It's refreshing to find out that something isn't working simply because something else happens to be working as planned, versus something just being broken. So that brought a breath of fresh air as we realized this to be the case. The atmospheric scattering of light actually works and we are happy about that.

As for the sun itself, we've been working out multiple layers in order for them to properly adjust depending on the angle you are looking at them. This, as we realized later, may have been a waste of time as we realized that if you look at the sun itself you are more than likely blinded. So assuming that the bloom effect will kick in and create that sort of effect of the sun being brighter and possibly blinding you (within reason), the layered effects of the sun itself may or may not play a part pertaining to the average user. That's not to say, though, that the sun doesn't look really good as a result of this effort.

Next in line for our attention is adding in the moon itself (which is a modified version of the sun routine and shouldn't take long), and then we're off to the spherical planet itself - which should be happening in about a day or two from this posting.

A lot of what we're doing now is simply adding the routines that we had made prior to the servers themselves. The reasoning for this was that at this stage, we would be able to simply drop the routines that were pre-made into the system and link them up.

Considering we've added the dynamic shadow system (which is also capable of casting shadows for semi-transparent and colored objects), I think we're making a lot of progress and should be able to do the beta release on June 1st without any major issues.

We'll keep everyone posted on the progress through the beta section, and also take a look at the programs section occasionally to see what systems tests we are putting forward for you to evaluate.

Until next time -

William Burns
Project Leader
Andromeda Media Universe

Formation for Transformation

We are at an "OK God, what next?" stage in the Connections project.

It's been about two years since we looked at our "Ministry Action Plan" (Our "MAP" - a version is available.) and the detail of what we are called to be and do. And since then:

• We have grown.
• Our broad context has changed – we are now under The Imagine Project
• Our immediate context has changed – the Parish around us is in a period of transition.
• We face immediate decisions with regard to our venue.
• We have something of a “clean slate” with regard to our own activities and programs.
  

It's time to hoist a flag to the winds once again to see which way they are being blown.

An easy way to handle this situation would be to look at the "holes" in our programs and try to fill them. However that's not always the best thing to do[1]. A process that relies on doing nothing more than saying "here's something we're not doing, let's do it!" leads to a number of dangers (some of which we ourselves have been tripped up by in the past) including:

• a focus on busy-ness and "doing stuff."
  
• promoting achieving a program rather than spiritual growth as a measure of "success"
  
• creating a co-dependency between "providers" and "receivers" - some programs require some people (often the majority) to be passive recipients and so can actually stop people from becoming active.
  

Noting where there is a hole in the program isn't always bad - for instance, building a youth ministry is high on our agenda for this year because it's an obvious "hole." But the main thing that we are called to do at times like this is to understand who God is calling us to be. In other words, what sort of culture are we to build and promote, and how do we make sure that our activities are not just for their own sake but actually do something of eternal significance?

Our success doesn't automatically come from having well-run programs but only when we see stuff happening that relates to what church is all about - the spiritual growth of Christians and the finding of spiritual life by those who have not yet encountered Christ.

And so we want to move in a direction so that we are a church which feeds and founds formation (spiritual growth of Christians) and transformation (finding of spiritual life by non-Christians). So perhaps we have a catchcry here - formation for transformation.

It isn't rocket-science - it's meant to look obvious! But even obvious things can be forgotten - the history of human organisations (such as churches!) will tell us that we will always tend to slip into the pride of "good works." Our need is to continually engage with the real substance of following God - a beautiful submission where his ends are achieved by his means through us - and steer deliberately away from the temptation to cling to the success of the things that we can do and achieve by ourselves.

Our engagement with this has started. At the beginning of the year we looked at what it meant to find God in "solitary places" - including being vulnerable before God, and open to daily devotions and the power of God's Word. In recent weeks we have been looking at the spiritual blessings from Ephesians 1 and our call to depend on Christ, be submitted to him, and to be "spiritual" - to have spiritual growth - formation for transformation.

And so perhaps our "what next" can be caught up in this catchcry of formation for transformation. This is the way we are heading - and it involves:

• Prayer, prayer and more spiritual prayer. As a body we need to be praying for each other and hearing from God by his Word and Spirit.
• Sharing stories, formally and informally, of what spiritual growth - formation and transformation - look like.
• Considering our current program of services (including KLT), small groups etc. and looking at how, simply in how they are arranged and managed, that we can broadly foster further spiritual growth.
• A number of us will be exploring different resources that we can make use of - from programs and courses, through to venues and other arrangements - and reporting back.
  

Over the next few days I'm planning to write a bit more about what formation for transformation looks like. It's time to interact, converse (use the comments on the blog!), and share our heart and look to God - "OK, what's next?"

What a fantastic time to be in.

[1] This wisdom can be seen in books such as Hawkins and Parkinson's Reveal from out of Willow Creek that I'm hoping to review on my other blog soon. [Edit: This is now available]

Hen night fun

On Saturday I went out on a hen night with some friends. We had a blast.

We met up at a rather nice pub with a beer garden and had a few drinks waiting for the hen to arrive. I thought it was the wedding she was supposed to be late for!

When she got there we went to town on her outfit: flashing tiara, veil, sash with flashing LEDs, L-plates, a big badge saying “Warning – Hen night in the area.” I also had a chuckle when some guys sat down at the next table and said “Uh-oh, hen night. Are we safe over here?” Apart from a couple of double takes, nobody gave me any hassle either. Even the staff seemed unfazed.

After a pitcher of something blue containing vodka, and getting to grips with our rude straws, we each had to pick a dare card. If we hadn’t performed the dare by the end of the evening, and well enough for the others to guess it, there would be a forfeit to pay! One of the girls asked what the forfeit was (smart girl – weighing up which was worse, her dare or the forfeit), but Chrissie had anticipated this. She said that the forfeit was a secret, but would be messy!

Sadly no-one ended up having to do a forfeit, so I don’t know what it would have been. Although my gut instinct is that it was just a way of getting everyone to join in, rather than an actual threat. I must ask her later what she had in mind…

When we finished our drinks we decided to move on. This took at least ten minutes as lots of bars have changed their names, or closed, and no-one had a strong opinion. I didn’t have a clue, I don’t often go drinking in the city, and I often stick to one or two places which are miles from where we were.

Walking through the city I regretted wearing heels, as despite Norfolk having a reputation for flatness, there are a lot of hills in Norwich and some are cobbled!

Aside: I’m not sure if any tranny-friendly shoe companies do flats. They seem to think all trannies want ridiculous stilettos!

After changing our mind several times we ended up in the Prince of Wales (that’s at the safer end of the descent into hell that is Prince of Wales Road). Still a bit quiet, but the Hen’s sister and friend were getting over their initial shock at my presence, and were nearly through all the silly remarks they had. More drinks again, then next door to Chicago’s. I’ve only been there once before, but I remembered it as pretty cool. Two levels with a balcony overlooking the dance floor.

Sadly health and safety has filled in the void over the original dance-floor to make a new one, but there was a beer garden – which pleased the smokers no end.

Unfortunately there was a bunch of scummy slappers who insisted on making snide remarks – not just about me, but the whole group (as we are all larger ladies). These trollops may have had slimmer bodies, but they looked like they were guests on the Jeremy Kyle show, and had personalities to match. There was an uncomfortable few minutes as the bruisers in each group sized each other up, but common sense prevailed and they moved elsewhere in the club and left us to enjoy our free champagne (another bonus of the hen night!)

Then came the next dilemma of the evening –which toilet to use? In the Prince I used the gents. It was still pretty light outside, and the place had more staff than patrons, so I played it safe, and prepared to explain my outfit as “fancy dress” if there were any problems, but it went without a hitch. In Chicago’s I was more nervous, but with an escort I braved the ladies and had no problems all night with “powdering my nose”.

Apart from the dance-floor and garden, Chicago’s also had some nice long booths with a big table and U-shaped leather benches, and we drank our drinks watching all the other hen parties come and go. There were at least four other groups and I was incredibly jealous of the hen in the ruffled white satin mini-dress.

Music was a bit naff though – far too much R n’B – although we got just enough classic pop for the hen to do her dare: down a shot every time the word “love” got sung.

By this time we were anxious to boogie, and had another debate on where to go. Eventually Liquid won, as one of the girls knew a doorman who could get us in free. We had some worries as one of the other girls was under 21 and had no ID, but it wasn’t a problem in the end. We got our drinks – and I did my dare to down my Malibu and coke in one – and headed for the dance floor.

For more grotty R n’B.

Another aside: I can’t understand the popularity of R n’B (“Urban” artists like 50 Cent and Nelly not classic Rhythm and Blues) in night clubs. It’s not easy to dance too, its not very sexy, and its tricky to sing along, especially if it’s a remix. I personally think the majority of people at the meat-market clubs would dance to anything if it gave them a chance to pull. Personally I prefer some good quality cheese if I want to dance (disco, 80s pop, 90s dance, current girly stuff like Girls Aloud etc).

But we had fun anyway. We got flirted with by a stag party; I got groped by a piss-head who got the message when I peeled his fingers off my hip; and the last girl to do her dare completed it by pinching a man’s bum.

The grown-ups in the group (me and Chrissie) were getting a bit tired now, and a lot hungry, so we called it a night and left the young-uns to dance. We stopped at the kebab shop, and then waited at the SOS bus for a taxi.

One last aside: The SOS bus is a fantastic idea. It’s a bendy-bus that parks a short distance from the clubs that is staffed by first-aiders to provide facilities for clubbers who are the worse for wear, but don’t need an ambulance. Somewhere to sit down and regain your composure, have a glass of water, get some relative peace and quiet, and just see a friendly face can do wonders. If you ever see them fundraising for it, dig deep!

As well as laughing at the antics of the drunks at the cash-point trying to act sober I also got to have my picture taken in the hen’s regalia (picture here). It’s not quite the same as the tranny-classic of the blushing bride, but a bride-to-be was good enough for me!

In the morning I had breakfast with the organiser who had quite an exasperated rant about the amount of stupid/ignorant/needlessly-rude people she witnessed making comments about me behind my back. She is very much of the opinion that people are allowed to be surprised, shocked or even amused by a bloke-in-a-dress, but there’s no call for snarky remarks (and that’s why I love you babe, mwah! xxx). A lot of people are already polite enough to keep their uninformed opinions to themselves, we just need the rest to follow suit now!

106 Books

Yeah, everyone's doing it.

Bold = I’ve read
Italic = Gave up on

* Anna Karenina
* Crime and Punishment
* Catch-22
* One Hundred Years of Solitude
* Wuthering Heights
* The Silmarillion
* Life of Pi : a novel
* The Name of the Rose
* Don Quixote
* Moby Dick
* Ulysses
* Madame Bovary
* The Odyssey
* Pride and Prejudice
* Jane Eyre
* The Tale of Two Cities
* The Brothers Karamazov
* Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies
* War and Peace
* Vanity Fair
* The Time Traveler’s Wife
* The Iliad
* Emma
* The Blind Assassin
* The Kite Runner
* Mrs. Dalloway
* Great Expectations
* American Gods
* A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
* Atlas Shrugged
* Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books
* Memoirs of a Geisha
* Middlesex
* Quicksilver
* Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
* The Canterbury tales
* The Historian : a novel
* A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
* Love in the Time of Cholera
* Brave New world
* The Fountainhead
* Foucault’s Pendulum
* Middlemarch
* Frankenstein
* The Count of Monte Cristo
* Dracula
* A Clockwork Orange
* Anansi Boys
* The Once and Future King
* The Grapes of Wrath
* The Poisonwood Bible : a novel
* 1984
* Angels & Demons
* The Inferno
* The Satanic Verses
* Sense and Sensibility
* The Picture of Dorian Gray
* Mansfield Park
* One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
* To the Lighthouse
* Tess of the D’Urbervilles
* Oliver Twist
* Gulliver’s Travels
* Les Misérables
* The Corrections
* The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
* The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
* Dune
* The Prince
* The Sound and the Fury
* Angela’s Ashes : a memoir
* The God of Small Things
* A People’s History of the United States : 1492-present
* Cryptonomicon
* Neverwhere
* A Confederacy of Dunces
* A Short History of Nearly Everything
* Dubliners
* The Unbearable Lightness of Being
* Beloved
* Slaughterhouse-five
* The Scarlet Letter
* Eats, Shoots & Leaves
* The Mists of Avalon
* Oryx and Crake : a novel
* Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed
* The Confusion
* Lolita
* Persuasion
* Northanger Abbey
* The Catcher in the Rye
* On the Road
* The Hunchback of Notre Dame
* Freakonomics : a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything
* Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance : an inquiry into values
* The Aeneid
* Watership Down
* Gravity’s Rainbow
* The Hobbit
* In Cold Blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences
* White Teeth
* Treasure Island
* David Copperfield
* The Three Musketeers

What is in a sound?

Today's post is about something that we often take for granted, something which we pay no real attention to because the effects are an automatic assumption.

Of course, we are talking about sound.

Sound comes in many types, bitrates, formats, and channels. We can say possibly that the codecs for sound formats such as MP3 or OGG are the shell in which the essence are wrapped, and that the interpreter itself is what utilizes this in order to produce the audio. But what happens when you take it another step forward, into the third dimension?

In real life, our ears are placed roughly 6 inches apart and separated by our head in between. When acoustics in the air reach each ear (we'll say a stereo channel, left or right) the sound itself is shaped by the very structure of our head in ever so subtle ways. This in turn, the left and right channels of our ears, allows our brain to process a spacial location for sounds that we hear.

There is a form of recorded audio known as Binaural Recording which uses this characteristic of human hearing to it's advantage, and places small microphones inside a dummy head modeled after a human head. Some even take this further and model in detail the fake human ears in which the tiny microphones reside.

When recorded in this manner, it is possible to convey spatial position to the listener as though the sounds were really happening around them - but the effect only works for headphones. This in itself is because headphones are placed over the ear and isolate each channel to the listener in the same manner that the tiny microphones for the dummy head were isolated (earbud headphones do a poor job keeping this effect)

Obviously this effect of Binaural Audio is lost when listening on a set of standard speakers, as the acoustics are out of phase, but it does bring up a very interesting idea concerning virtual audio implementations.

When listening to a Binaural recording with headphones, your brain fills in the blanks and then informs you of the positions for each sound as they are located around you. So if there is a guitar playing in front of you, the acoustics in binaural audio would trick your brain into telling you there is a guitar playing in front of you. The same can be said for all space around you - left, right, front, back, up and down.

The down side to binaural audio (other than the headphones) is that since it is recorded via a stationary microphone setup, moving your head around does not change the locations appropriately of the sound locations. Instead it would seem that you are moving the entire room when you move your head.

Applying this idea, though, to a virtual world, we suddenly see the amazing benefits to having positional audio. Where in many cases today, virtual environments only offer four degrees of spatial awareness in audio (left, right, near, far) applying full spatial audio techniques to a virtual world would offer us the ability to hear with higher resolution.

As an example, let us say we have a chirping bird as a looping sound effect.

In a system with four degrees of spatial awareness (left, right, near, far) we would only be able to place said bird to our left or right and with a relative distance. With a full spatial audio algorithm, we would be able to hear with higher resolution, in that not only would we mentally place said bird to our right or left, near or far, but also above, below, front or behind.

Increasing spatial audio resolution to 8 degrees of freedom doubles the accuracy by which the brain can tell the listener where in a 3D space a sound is located. In this latter case, we are talking about the difference between knowing the bird is on our left or right and near or far, to knowing that same bird is on our right, behind us, about 25 feet up, and about 50 feet distance.

When utilized with multiple sounds, we in turn create a fully spatial soundscape for the user, and thusly a fully immersive environment. So then we take this one step further, because in a virtual environment we can move around.

With a spatial audio algorithm, the audio samples and locations would be dynamically adjusted as you moved around, so moving in the virtual world would alter this spatial soundscape in real time.

The effect would only work either with headphones or a surround sound setup, but when you listen only with a normal set of speakers the audio would sound like normal audio without the spatial effect. At best you may be returned to left, right, near and far (4 degrees) versus a full 8 degrees of audio.

If you have a pair of headphones handy, and are ready for a really amazing experience, we have provided a link to a list of streaming samples. One of our favorites happens to be the Virtual Haircut.

Binaural (Holophonic) Audio Examples - Listen With Headphones!

Until Next Time -

Andromeda Media Universe
Development Team