Dr. Dirk Schröder receives the Borchers Plaque
RWTH Rector Ernst Schmachtenberg (right) and Chair of proRWTH Dr. Gunther Voswinckel (left) award Dr. Dirk Schröder with the Borchers Plaque
At RWTH Aachen University, it is a tradition to honor outstanding graduates. The Borchers Plaque is awarded to doctoral students of RWTH Aachen University who have passed their PhD with 'summa cum laude' (with highest distinction). On June 21, 2013, Dr. Dirk Schröder received the Borchers Plaque for his PhD thesis 'Physically based real-time auralization of interactive virtual environments'.
During his PhD studies at the Institute of Technical Acoustics (ITA), Dirk focused on the development of an interactive real-time framework for room acoustics simulation, called RAVEN. Starting from scratch, Dirk investigated and extended the methods of Geometrical Acoustics towards advances for a physically correct simulation of complex environments and took up the challenge of their flexible real-time implementation. By the time when Dirk finished his PhD in 2011, RAVEN had already become an integral part of RWTH Aachen University's Virtual Reality system, which is a reference platform for developing and applying multi-modal virtual environments.
In more detail, the RAVEN framework is capable of rendering high quality spatial audio in real-time that can truly compete with the accuracy of state-of-the-art commercial offline applications. Being absolutely unique in the large number of simulation features, RAVEN offers today a physically accurate real-time auralization of sound propagation in complex environments including important wave effects such as sound scattering, airborne sound insulation between rooms and sound diffraction. Despite this realistic sound field rendering, not only are spatially distributed and freely movable sound sources and receivers supported at runtime but also modifications and manipulations of the environment itself.
A complete description of the RAVEN framework is given in Dirk's PhD thesis that can be downloaded here.