Ocean Sound Lab: A software environment for introduction to underwater acoustics
Ocean Sound Lab (OSL) is a user friendly, interactive educational software environment introducing underwater sound and underwater acoustic propagation. It contains a number of interactive applications simulating ocean acoustic propagation effects, such as acoustic refraction, shadow zone and caustic formation, multipath, etc. Optimized codes are used for real time calculation and analysis of underwater acoustic fields and signals, involving ray theoretic propagation, calculation of time domain channel response, etc. Interaction with the OSL is through a touch screen (or plain screen) microphone and speakers (or headphones) using the microphone the user can input and analyze any preferred sound or see how this sound would propagate to large distances in typical underwater environments, all in real time. For the sake of completeness, OSL also contains multimedia presentations of interesting underwater sounds, brief tutorials on basic sound and underwater sound physics, as well as knowledge tests. OSL runs under MS/Windows and has multilingual capabilities. Its multimedia content (sounds, images, texts) and its language specific entries are open to change by the operator. OSL has been developed in Visual Studio and Flash.