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Faith Is Not A Virtue

When I was a young boy, my parents were not particularly religious. You might think of them as having been ‘Christmas and Easter Christians’ because those were about the only events that were significant enough to move them to attend a service at the local Anglican church.

My aunt and uncle, however, were much stronger Christians. They had been attending a modern evangelical church for quite some time. In 1996, when I was about 10, they finally managed to persuade my parents to go with them to one of these services. Before long, my parents ‘saw the light’ and were successfully converted to this new faith.

We began attending regular Sunday services at a young evangelical church that met in a school hall just around the block from our house. At the age of about 12, I ‘gave my life to Jesus’ by reciting a short prayer, guided by my mother. On a few occasions, we hosted baptisms in our swimming pool and our back yard would be packed with happy people from our little church community. I enjoyed the vague sense of being involved with something of importance that events of this nature gave me.

The Backslide

As I grew up, though, I became less interested in church. Not being much of a socialite, the community aspects didn’t fulfil me. I had far more interesting things to do than use up a perfectly good Sunday morning worshipping a god that I had never really felt or listening to a preach that just rehashed the same ideas in slightly different ways each time.

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I Want HRTFs In My Games!

You’re the last man standing on your team and you’re going to have to work some magic to win this round. As you approach the objective, you hear footsteps from somewhere on your right. In a flash, you turn to face the sound but there’s nothing there. BANG! – you’re dead. It turns out those footsteps were coming from ‘above-right and slightly behind you’ but you couldn’t perceive that because this game’s audio sucks!

Whilst the sophistication of graphics in video games has steadily increased in the last decade, the same cannot be said for audio, which has remained stagnant and even regressed somewhat. Video games are an ideal case for integrating 3D audio technologies and yet they continue to be ignored.

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