Assessing Diffraction Perception Under Reverberant Conditions in Virtual Reality

Mannall J, Calamia P, Savioja L, Neidhardt A, Mason R, De Sena E. Assessing Diffraction Perception Under Reverberant Conditions in Virtual Reality. In: AES 2024 International Conference on Audio for Virtual and Augmented Reality. Audio Engineering Society; 2024. Paper 16. Available from: https://aes.org/publications/elibrary-page/?id=22665

@inproceedings{Mannall2024_22665,
  author = {Mannall, Joshua and Calamia, Paul and Savioja, Lauri and Neidhardt, Annika and Mason, Russell and De Sena, Enzo},
  title = {{Assessing Diffraction Perception Under Reverberant Conditions in Virtual Reality}},
  booktitle = {AES 2024 International Conference on Audio for Virtual and Augmented Reality},
  note = {Paper 16},
  year = {2024},
  month = aug,
  publisher = {Audio Engineering Society},
  url = {https://aes.org/publications/elibrary-page/?id=22665}
}

TY  - CPAPER
TI  - Assessing Diffraction Perception Under Reverberant Conditions in Virtual Reality
AU  - Mannall, Joshua
AU  - Calamia, Paul
AU  - Savioja, Lauri
AU  - Neidhardt, Annika
AU  - Mason, Russell
AU  - De Sena, Enzo
T2  - AES 2024 International Conference on Audio for Virtual and Augmented Reality
M1  - Paper 16
PY  - 2024
DA  - 2024/08/05
UR  - https://aes.org/publications/elibrary-page/?id=22665
PB  - Audio Engineering Society
LA  - en
AB  - When a sound source is occluded, diffraction replaces direct sound as the first wavefront arrival and can influence important aspects of perception such as localisation. Few experiments have investigated how diffraction modelling influences the perceived plausibility of an acoustic simulation. In this paper, an experiment was run to investigate the plausibility of an acoustic simulation with and without diffraction in an L-shaped room in VR. The rendering was carried out using a real-time 6DOF geometrical acoustics and feedback-delay-network hybrid model, and diffraction was modelled using the physically accurate Biot-Tolstoy-Medwin model. The results show that diffraction increases the perceived plausibility of the acoustic simulation. In addition, the study compared diffraction of the direct sound alone and diffraction of both direct and reflected sound. A significant increase in plausibility was found by the addition of diffracted reflection paths, but only in the so-called shadow zone.
ER  -