The Acoustics of Room Transitions

From Thomas McKenzie.

The plausible reproduction of room acoustics is important for maintained immersion in six degrees-of-freedom (DOF) virtual reality. While literature exists on the auditory experience when changing position inside a room, little has been published on the transition from one room to its neighbour, which is more complex due to additional acoustical phenomena such as diffraction, occlusion and the fact that there are two room reverberations being combined.

To investigate this, a dataset of room impulse responses has been measured using a spherical microphone array for the transitions between two rooms for four scenarios. This dataset can be used to analyse the acoustics of room transitions and gain further understanding of the perceptual experience. Additionally, along with visuals from room scans, a 6-DOF recreation of the transition is possible.

This research has been accepted for publication in the IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, & Signal Processing (ICASSP), 6th June 2021. The dataset is publicly available now at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4095493.