Media Rooms: The Waves & Sounds simulators include three media rooms: The Ripple Tank (Ripple Lab), the Smart Sound Room and the Connecting Sound Room (both Sound Lab). Media rooms are the calculation engines of Waves & Sounds. They allow the modeling of water or sounds waves through a medium, but only during Run mode. Media rooms compute and render two-dimensional wave patterns. In addition, Ripple Tanks and Smart Sound Rooms can animate those same wave patterns.

In all media rooms, you can change the characteristics of the media. In Smart Sound Rooms and Connecting Sound Rooms, you simply change the medium itself. In Ripple Tanks, changing the wave velocity has the same practical effect on wave propagation.

In media rooms, you can model generation of waves by either point sources (point source [Ripple Lab] and point source [Sound Lab]) or linear (planar) sources (linear source [Ripple Lab] or speaker [Sound Lab]). You can also model reflection and absorption using baffles [Ripple Lab] or reflective walls [Sound Lab]). None of these media room-specific elements can be placed outside of media rooms.

Finally, you can model wave dynamics at boundaries and interfaces using the Ripple Tank's movable bottom feature or Connecting Sound Rooms. In each case, you can only model linear or planar waves.

In Sound Lab, you can place microphones (also a media room-only element) in media rooms. In Smart Sound Rooms, you can also model Doppler effects by adding velocities to point sources and microphones.