Virginia Tech’s Institute for Creativity, Arts and Technology (ICAT) has created an immersive 3-D audio environment. Christened “The Cube,” this unique four-story theater and high-tech laboratory features one of the highest-channel count 3-D audio systems in the world. The facility combines multi-screen video and 3-D sound from 145 loudspeakers to bring creative artists, educators and audiences together in a four-story, black box theater that’s one of the largest on the East Coast.
Housed in the new Moss Arts Center in Blacksburg, VA, ICAT is Virginia Tech’s newest research institute, sharing the Moss Arts facilities with the Center for the Arts at Virginia Tech, a presentation organization. Besides The Cube, the Moss Arts Center houses the Anne and Elle Fife Theatre which is in the Street and Davis Performance Hall.
Not Your Typical Black Box Theater
The Cube’s unusual 50 by 40 by 32-foot (WxLxH) dimensions and high loudspeaker count ignited discussions early in the project about how to effectively move and control audio across the space. The Cube’s highly adaptable space required an audio distribution solution with extensive reach and a highly flexible architecture to ensure creative freedom across a multitude of projects. The engineering minds at Virginia Tech’s Institute for Creativity, Arts and Technology joined forces with noted consulting firm Arup (arup.com) to address the challenge, architecting a solution to support the cutting-edge data exploration, intimate performances, audio and visual installations, and experiential investigations that happen regularly in The Cube.
“In addition to the music, dance, theatre, and art that the Center for the Arts presents, ICAT has purposed The Cube as a multi-disciplinary research lab for research science, engineering, art, and design,” said Tanner Upthegrove, the media engineer at the Institute. While the Moss Arts Center was under construction, ICAT planned to make The Cube a collaborative, immersive environment combining virtual/augmented reality, spatial sound, and other theatrical elements. The Cube is big enough for multiple people to explore virtual environments together and features a few miles of audio, video, and data connectivity with a patch panel system.
Rob Gainer — Upthegrove’s colleague and audio supervisor for Virginia Tech’s Center for the Arts — and Arup suggested that Audinate’s Dante would cost-efficiently address the requirement for reliable networking across the large spatial audio installation.
“The Cube is unusual because it’s built like a traditional black box theater, but often used for heavy-duty scientific and next-generation research that’s collaborative in nature, adds Upthegrove. “We needed a robust infrastructure to support everything we set out to accomplish in this facility. We started by running Gigabit Ethernet across the facility, with fiber analog audio and digital video connections throughout. It quickly became clear that Dante would allow us to leverage our planned network without headaches, while being the most cost-effective and technologically sound means of achieving our vision for immersive 3D audio experiences.”
Following evaluations of various networking technologies, the team confirmed that Dante would offer faculty, students, and visiting artists and researchers the freedom to work at any position in The Cube.
“Dante is agnostic for the user, so most contributors can use the network with either network-enabled hardware or the Dante Virtual Sound Card on a computer,” said Upthegrove. “That’s very important here, since we aren’t always aware who will come into the facility and plug into the system.”
Denis Blount, acoustic and AV designer at ARUP, notes that Dante was a natural fit for the Gigabit Ethernet infrastructure put into place. Importantly, that infrastructure did not have to be supplemented to implement Dante, reducing complexity across the board. “Dante was the obvious choice compared to other solutions. We could use the switches and Cat-6 cabling that were in place, and it gave us the ability patch and reconfigure on the soft side as required,” said Blount.
Upthegrove also emphasized the cost-reducing benefits — notably requiring only 15 percent the amount of copper wiring that an all-analog installation would need — as well as scalability, enabling nearly limitless possibilities moving forward.
Inside the System
The design of the spatial audio system was a huge undertaking. ICAT partnered with ARUP’s acoustical and design experts Blount and Terence Caulkins to design the core audio system. Now operational, the Cube Spatial Audio Renderer (CSAR) features a 134.4 spatial audio system plus nine Holosonic Labs AS-24 directional speakers.
Creating any surround system — particularly for 134.4 playback — requires a lot of hardware. The 124 main speakers are JBL SCS 8 (two-way 8-inch coaxial, full-range cinema surround loudspeakers) with 64 in the horizontal plane and 60 covering the vertical axis. Ten JBL LSR 6328 studio monitors are also employed. Four Meyer Sound UMS-1P handle the subwoofer duties. some 16 Dante-equipped Yamaha XMV8280-D 8-channel power amps provide the punch, while Dante-enabled BSS BLU 806 digital signal processors, which allow users to effortlessly route signals across any location in The Cube.
Audio system calibration is via AFMG’s Systune software, fed from an Earthworks M23 measurement mic through a Lectrosonics TM400 reference grade Tx/Rx wireless rig and a Sound Devices USBPre 2 preamp.
All WFS (Wave Field Synthesis) rendering is via Sonic Emotion’s Sonic Wave I rig, sent through a Focusrite RedNet6 MaDI-Dante/Dante-MADI converter for distribution to the playback system. Sonic Wave I controls all the speakers in a room to reproduce sound sources that are virtually outside the room.
Smooth Sailing
According to Upthegrove, “the facility is working as planned, often being used 24 hours a day during the academic semester.”
Among the diverse projects hosted by The Cube so far include mapping real meteorological data has been mapped into virtual reality environments; concerts for the Society for Electro-Acoustic Music; acoustical research and VR modeling for immersive virtual reality of Virginia Tech’s Lane Stadium; and OperaCraft — a virtual opera pairing Minecraft avatar projections controlled by teens with an opera sung by Virginia Tech vocalists.
“The Dante network and its corresponding hardware reduces the costs and labor of buying and running cable, and eliminates separate converters and peripheral equipment that would otherwise drive up expenses,” Upthegrove adds. “We’re using off-the-shelf networking components to fuel the topology, which is very convenient and very inexpensive. And as we expand beyond 145 audio channels, it’s as easy as plugging a device into the switch and adding another Dante soundcard. Just like that, there are dozens of additional channels. It’s very simple, and we’re well-prepared for future expansion.”
For more information, visit ICAT’s Cube page at www.icat.vt.edu/content/cube-0.
