Crystal River Engineering Inc. was an American technology company best known for their pioneering work in HRTF

Head-related transfer function

A head-related transfer function is a response that characterizes how an ear receives a sound from a point in space; a pair of HRTFs for two ears can be used to synthesize a binaural sound that seems to come from a particular point in space. Some consumer home entertainment products designed to...

 based real-time binaural

Binaural recording

Binaural recording is a method of recording sound that uses two microphones, arranged with the intent to create a 3-D stereo sound sensation for the listener of actually being in the room with the performers or instruments. This effect is often created using a technique known as "Dummy head...

, or 3D sound processing hardware and software. The company was founded in 1989 by Scott Foster after he received a contract from NASA

NASA

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration is the agency of the United States government that is responsible for the nation's civilian space program and for aeronautics and aerospace research...

 to create the audio component of VIEW (Virtual Environment Workstation Project), a Virtual Reality

Virtual reality

Virtual reality , also known as virtuality, is a term that applies to computer-simulated environments that can simulate physical presence in places in the real world, as well as in imaginary worlds...

 based training simulator for astronauts. Crystal River Engineering was acquired by Aureal Semiconductor in 1996.

Crystal River's innovations in the field of real-time 3D audio processing were published in a series of papers by NASA's Elizabeth Wenzel and Crystal River's Scott Foster.