A walk-through system for building acoustics evaluation based on virtual environment technology

Virtual Reality technology, especially visualization and auralization, provides a useful method to interactively implement the subjective analysis and evaluation of acoustic properties prior to the actual construction of a building. This paper presents a Virtual Environment-based walk-through system for interactive acoustic evaluation of buildings within a CAVE environment. It describes the architecture of the system, the system components, schedule algorithm, synchronous integration of acoustic simulation and visualization. The trade-off algorithm of the real time simplified acoustic space simulation by B-format soundfield representation, non real time detailed acoustic space simulation and the comparison between them are also mentioned. Some cases such as airport, cinema, boardroom, underground station and classroom are studied in the two simulation methods respectively. The potential applications of this system are presented as well.