Interactive 3D audio rendering in flexible playback configurations

Interactive object-based 3D audio spatialization technology has become commonplace in personal computers and game consoles. While its primary current application is 3D game sound track rendering, it is ultimately necessary in the implementation of any personal or shared immersive virtual world (including multi-user communication and telepresence). The successful development and deployment of such applications in new mobile or online platforms involves maximizing the plausibility of the synthetic 3D audio scene while minimizing the computational and memory footprint of the audio rendering engine. It also requires a flexible, standardized scene description model to facilitate the development of applications targeting multiple platforms. This paper reviews a general computationally efficient 3D positional audio and environmental reverberation rendering engine applicable to a wide range of loudspeaker or headphone playback configurations.