Spatial Sound Rendering for Audio Augmented Reality

Interactive audio spatialization technology is an essential component of platforms supporting shared immersive virtual experiences, including co-presence, remote collaboration, and entertainment. Modern wearable virtual and augmented reality display devices integrate real-time binaural audio engines that dynamically render multiple sound objects and allow users and their avatars to navigate seamlessly across real and virtual acoustic environments. To support such experiences, a shared audio scene rendering interface facilitates the creation and exchange of immersive, interactive, and persistent 3D soundscapes across multiple independent applications. This chapter presents a practical approach for realizing parametric, six-degree-of-freedom (6-DoF) interactive audio rendering engines that deliver to a user the perceptual auditory cues ensuring audio–visual congruence and virtual-real coherence in extended reality experiences. The description model accounts for the effects of room acoustics, reflective surfaces, and obstacles in “acoustic digital twins” of real or virtual spaces. The rendering interface is interoperable across diverse applicative platforms and allows modeling each audio object as a natural sound source with controllable attributes such as distance, orientation, size, and acoustic radiation properties. By facilitating the interoperability of augmented audio reality applications with generic audio display devices, this solution enables seamless integration of immersive audio into the evolving XR ecosystem, enabling engagement, personalization and free-viewpoint navigation in both interactive experiences and recorded or broadcast media.