Abstract
In virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), and gaming, accurate rendering of room acoustics plays an important role in achieving high levels of auditory immersion. This is underscored by a recent study which demonstrated that including room acoustics in VR has the same effect on immersion as increasing video resolution five-fold. VR/AR/gaming applications typically operate under stringent computational constraints, making most physics-based acoustic models impractical. Artificial reverberators, which amount to appropriately designed IIR filters, are more suitable in this context due to their low computational complexity. However, they usually only reproduce certain perceptual properties of reverberation and cannot render the acoustics of specific room geometries. This talk will discuss recent advancements in this area that enable rendering the acoustics of complex room geometries, including diffraction effects, while keeping a low computational complexity.
Short bio
Enzo De Sena is Professor (Full Professor) and Director of the Institute of Sound Recording (IoSR) at the University of Surrey. His research interests include spatial audio, room acoustics modelling, sound field reproduction, beamforming and binaural modelling. He received the PhD degree from King’s College London, UK, in 2013. Between 2013 and 2016 he was a postdoctoral researcher at KU Leuven, Belgium. He held visiting researcher positions at Stanford University, Aalborg University, Imperial College London and King’s College London. He currently serves on the IEEE AASP Technical Committee and on the editorial board of EURASIP JASM and IEEE/ACM TrASLP as Associate Editor. He chaired DAFx-24 and regularly serves as area chair at ICASSP and WASPAA. He is a recipient of an EPSRC New Investigator Award and co-recipient of best paper awards at WASPAA-21 and AVAR-22. For more information see: desena.org.