Reproducing Real World Acoustics in Virtual Reality UsingSpherical Cameras

Virtual Reality (VR) systems have been intensely explored, with several research communities investigating the different modalities involved. Regarding the audio modality, one of the main issues is the generation of sound that is perceptually coherent with the visual reproduction. Here, we propose a pipeline for creating plausible interactive reverb using visual information: first, we characterize real environment acoustics given a pair of spherical cameras; then, we reproduce reverberant spatial sound, by using the estimated acoustics, within a VR scene. The evaluation is made by extracting the room impulse responses (RIRs) of four virtually rendered rooms. Results show agreement, in terms of objective metrics, between the synthesized acoustics and the ones calculated from RIRs recorded within the respective real rooms.

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