We demonstrate the first integration of wave acoustics in a virtual reality operating system. The Windows mixed reality shell hosts third-party applications inside a 3D virtual home, propagating sound from these applications throughout the environment to provide a natural user interface. Rather than applying manually-designed reverberation volumes or ray-traced geometric acoustics, we use wave acoustics that robustly captures cues like diffracted occlusion and reverberation propagating through portals while reducing the design and maintenance burden. We describe our rendering implementation, materials-based design techniques, reverberation tuning, dynamic range management, and temporal smoothing that ensure a natural listening experience across unpredictable audio content and user motion.

Authors: Godin, Keith W.; Rohrer, Ryan; Snyder, John; Raghuvanshi, Nikunj
Affiliation: Microsoft Corp., Redmond, WA, USA
AES Conference: 2018 AES International Conference on Audio for Virtual and Augmented Reality (August 2018)
Paper Number: P7-3
Publication Date: August 11, 2018

Click to purchase paper as a non-member or you can login as an AES member to see more options.

No AES members have commented on this paper yet.

Subscribe to this discussion

To be notified of new comments on this paper you can subscribe to this RSS feed. Forum users should login to see additional options.

Start a discussion!

If you would like to start a discussion about this paper and are an AES member then you can login here:
Username:
Password:

If you are not yet an AES member and have something important to say about this paper then we urge you to join the AES today and make your voice heard. You can join online today by clicking here.