Real-time auralization of coupled rooms
Frank Wefers, Dirk Schröder · RWTH Publications (RWTH Aachen) · 2009
In this work we present a technique to auralize complex virtual acoustic scenes including room acoustics with particular respect to sound propagation across or between coupled rooms. We pay special attention to interactive scenes. Sound propagation inside buildings is highly complex. In order to make it realtime applicable and thus usable in interactive virtual acou stic environments, we restrict the multitude of possible sound propagation paths to discrete-space coupling joints between rooms (e.g. doors and windows), called portals. Based on this reduced sound propagation model we present algorithms to determine sound propagation paths and we show how these can be auralized using real-time FIR filtering, which is usually performed by non-uniform partitioned convolution in the frequency-domain. Interactivity can incorporate real-time modification of th e scene and its portals, which can massively influence the room acous tics. We describe how such time-variant state changes in the scene can be handled in real-time and discuss the performance of our approach.