Immersive Visualization of Room Acoustics

Visualization of sound propagation inside rooms is one of the main purposes of room acoustic simulations. Visualization is often applied in teaching, but also consultants need visualization to understand better the propagation of sound waves in complex cases. Traditionally, propagation paths of sound rays or image sources (representing reflections) have been applied in visualization. In addition, wave field animations on 2-D planes have been applied. In this paper we overview traditional acoustic visualization methods and we present a novel way to look at visualizations in an immersive virtual environment. With virtual reality equipment the user can be immersed inside the 3-D models and look at the visualizations of sound propagation inside the computer model of a room. We present the implemented immersive ray-based animations computed with ray-tracing. In addition, we report particle animations that were implemented to see waveform-like visualizations. Finally, we discuss the benefits of immersive visualization as well as user interface issues.