Real-time 3D Audio Downmixing System based on Sound Rendering for the Immersive Sound of Mobile Virtual Reality Applications

• Dukki Hong,
• Hyuck-Joo Kwon,
• Cheong Ghil Kim,
• Woo-Chan Park,

Vol. 12, No. 12, December 30, 2018
10.3837/tiis.2018.12.018 , Download Paper (Free):

• 3D Audio
• audio mixing system
• Virtual reality
• sound rendering
• ray tracing
• FPGA

Abstract

Eight out of the top ten the largest technology companies in the world are involved in some way with the coming mobile VR revolution since Facebook acquired Oculus. This trend has allowed the technology related with mobile VR to achieve remarkable growth in both academic and industry. Therefore, the importance of reproducing the acoustic expression for users to experience more realistic is increasing because auditory cues can enhance the perception of the complicated surrounding environment without the visual system in VR. This paper presents a audio downmixing system for auralization based on hardware, a stage of sound rendering pipelines that can reproduce realiy-like sound but requires high computation costs. The proposed system is verified through an FPGA platform with the special focus on hardware architectural designs for low power and real-time. The results show that the proposed system on an FPGA can downmix maximum 5 sources in real-time rate (52 FPS), with 382 mW low power consumptions. Furthermore, the generated 3D sound with the proposed system was verified with satisfactory results of sound quality via the user evaluation.

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