A 3d Real Time Rendering Engine for Binaural Sound Reproduction

A method of computationally efficient 3D sound reproduction via headphones is presented using a virtual Ambisonic approach. Previous studies have shown that incorporating head tracking as well as room simulation is important to improve sound source localization capabilities. The simulation of virtual acoustic space requires to filter the stimuli with head related transfer functions (HRTFs). In time-varying systems this yields the problem of high quality interpolation between different HRTFs. The proposed model states that encoding signals into Ambisonic domain results in time-invariant HRTF filters. The proposed system is implemented on a usual notebook using Pure Data (PD), a graphically based open source real time computer music software.