MICROPHONE-BASED WIND VELOCITY SENSORS AND THEIR APPLICATION TO INTERACTIVE ANIMATION

We are developing a simple low-cost wind velocity sensor based on small microphones. The sensor system consists of 4 microphones covered with specially shaped wind screens, 4 pre-amplifiers that respond to low frequency, and a commercial sound interface with multi channel inputs. In this paper, we first present the principle of the sensor, i.e., technique to successfully suppress the influence of external noise existing in the environment in order to determine the wind velocity and the wind direction from the output from a microphone. Then, we present an application for generating realistic motions of a virtual tree swaying in real wind. Although the current sensor outputs significant leaps in a measured sequence of directions, the interactive animations demonstrate that it is usable for such applications, if we could reduce the leaps to some degree.