3D sound rendering for virtual environments with octree

In this paper, we present a 3D sound rendering system with octree to simulate the virtual sound of virtual environments. Our system uses ray tracing method for sound propagation from a source to a listener, but just for specular reflections now. In order to accelerate our system, we use an octree to simplify the scene objects before the sound propagation. This can decrease the intersection times in the sound propagation. According to compare different accelerate algorithms for ray tracing with the render time, the total number of ray-triangles tests, ray-triangle intersections and ray-volumes tests, it is proved that octree can have a short rendering time. Finally we use the octree in our system to render a 3D sound of virtual environment.