If you’ve ever played video games, you know that for the most part, they look a lot better than they sound. That’s largely due to the fact that audible sound waves are much longer – and a lot more crafty – than visual light waves, and therefore, much more difficult to replicate in simulated environments. But Dr. Nikunj Raghuvanshi, a Senior Researcher in the Interactive Media Group at Microsoft Research, is working to change that by bringing the quality of game audio up to speed with the quality of game video. He wants you to hear how sound really travels – in rooms, around corners, behind walls, out doors – and he’s using computational physics to do it.

Today, Dr. Raghuvanshi talks about the unique challenges of simulating realistic sound on a budget (both money and CPU), explains how classic ideas in concert hall acoustics need a fresh take for complex games like Gears of War, reveals the computational secret sauce you need to deliver the right sound at the right time, and tells us about Project Triton, an acoustic system that models how real sound waves behave in 3-D game environments to makes us believe with our ears as well as our eyes.