LADYDRAGON.COM - Dolby Lends Expertise to Sound Design Team for America's Army: Operations, Combining Realism and Emotion

Monday July 01, 2002

Dolby Lends Expertise to Sound Design Team for America's Army: Operations, Combining Realism and Emotion

Level of Realism in Ambient Sound Allows Civilians to Virtually Experience Serving Their Country

Uncle Sam wanted Dolby Laboratories when it came to sound design on the upcoming ultra-realistic America's Army: Operations(TM), a first-person action game for the PC platform that allows players to enter into "virtual service" with the US Army. To fully draw the player into the game aurally and visually, the government's development team set--and reached--a design goal of creating the most realistic audio representation of combat environments possible.

Experts from Dolby aided the team using entertainment industry techniques and high-end simulations to combine intense realism with emotion. Using both custom recorded sounds and resources from sound libraries, they spent a great deal of time getting the audio effects in the game as accurate as possible. America's Army: Operations was conceived and sponsored by the US Army's Office of Economic and Manpower Analysis and created in-house at the Modeling, Virtual Environments and Simulation Institute (MOVES) at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California.

"What makes America's Army: Operations unique is the incredible amount of relevant military detail rendered throughout the game, and that each animated action requires an appropriate auditory response," said Lieutenant Commander Russell Shilling, Ph.D., Sound Designer for America's Army. "This realism is achieved not just through accurate recordings, but by creating an illusion for the listener that the auditory representation is accurate."

America's Army: Operations employs unique sounds for different materials and textures encountered in the game. For instance, footsteps, shell casings, bullet impacts, grenades, and so forth., will sound different depending on whether they land on wood, metal, concrete, water, or dirt. Bullets hitting glass and walls will shower fragments sonically and grenade explosions will cause players' ears to ring.
"When you add these details to the immersive auditory experience offered by a Dolby Digital system, the result is compelling and extremely dramatic," Shilling continued. "In an America's Army: Operations firefight, it is not uncommon to hear bullets whizzing and snapping by your ears and impacting the wall behind you, which ricochet and cause a shower of debris around you--meanwhile, you're fumbling to clear a jam in your weapon."

A special Recon version of America's Army: Operations can be downloaded free at www.americasarmy.com on the Fourth of July. Players can also register on the website for the free full version of the game on disc, which will be available later this summer on the Windows(R) PC platform. Both the disk and downloadable versions will be Dolby(R) Digital 5.1 certified.

    About the Army and the MOVES Institute, Naval Postgraduate School

    America's Army was conceived and funded by the Army in association with the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California. The MOVES Institute was chosen for the project, in part, because the Institute is responsible for training Modeling and Simulation professionals for the Army, Navy, Marines, and foreign services. The mission of the Naval Postgraduate School's MOVES Institute is research, application, and education in the grand challenges of modeling, virtual environments, and simulation. The Institute operates both independently and in collaboration with various US Navy and defense modeling and simulation (M&S) centers to conduct research, analyze M&S programs, create advanced prototypes, and develop real technologies and applications for the defense community.

    About Dolby in Games

    Dolby technology allows gamers to experience cinematic-quality surround sound, and has become the standard for audio in next generation games. Dolby works closely with the game development community to raise the bar in game audio quality. Dolby has also developed the groundbreaking Interactive Content Encoder that enables real-time Dolby Digital encoding in game consoles. Today, Dolby Surround, Dolby Digital, and Dolby Pro Logic(R) II are incorporated in hundreds of game titles on every major game platform.

    About Dolby Laboratories

    Dolby Laboratories is the developer of signal processing systems used worldwide in applications that include motion picture sound, consumer entertainment products and media, broadcasting, and music recording. Based in San Francisco with European headquarters in England, the privately held company also has offices in New York, Los Angeles, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Beijing, and Tokyo.
www.dolby.com.