A survey of HRTF dataset use in academia and industry reveals no de facto standard

Pollack K, Brinkmann F, Lladó P, Meyer-Kahlen N. A survey of HRTF dataset use in academia and industry reveals no de facto standard. In: AVARIG 2026: Audio for Virtual and Augmented Reality and Immersive Games. Audio Engineering Society; 2026. Paper 10340. Available from: https://aes.org/publications/elibrary-page/?id=23302

@inproceedings{Pollack2026_23302,
  author = {Pollack, Katharina and Brinkmann, Fabian and Lladó, Pedro and Meyer-Kahlen, Nils},
  title = {{A survey of HRTF dataset use in academia and industry reveals no de facto standard}},
  booktitle = {AVARIG 2026: Audio for Virtual and Augmented Reality and Immersive Games},
  note = {Paper 10340},
  year = {2026},
  month = jun,
  publisher = {Audio Engineering Society},
  url = {https://aes.org/publications/elibrary-page/?id=23302}
}

TY  - CPAPER
TI  - A survey of HRTF dataset use in academia and industry reveals no de facto standard
AU  - Pollack, Katharina
AU  - Brinkmann, Fabian
AU  - Lladó, Pedro
AU  - Meyer-Kahlen, Nils
T2  - AVARIG 2026: Audio for Virtual and Augmented Reality and Immersive Games
M1  - Paper 10340
PY  - 2026
DA  - 2026/06/30
UR  - https://aes.org/publications/elibrary-page/?id=23302
PB  - Audio Engineering Society
LA  - en
AB  - Head-related transfer functions (HRTFs) are crucial for plausible binaural audio playback for virtual, augmented, and mixed-reality applications. In such applications, humans showed higher sound-localisation accuracy, higher perceived externalisation, and experience less colouration when using their individual HRTFs compared to nonindividual HRTFs. Because high-quality individual HRTFs require cumbersome measurements in specialised facilities, applications often use non-indivdual or dummy-head HRTFs as a practical alternative. Humans are able to adapt to non-individual HRTFs, which leads to a localisation performance comparable to that achieved with individual HRTFs. Therefore, adaptation to non-individual HRTFs could be a practical alternative whenever individual HRTFs are unavailable; However, this would only be possible if the same non-individual standard HRTF was used across different applications. To find out if this is the case, we conducted a survey on HRTF usage among 76 professionals working in the field of spatial audio. The findings suggest that there is currently no de facto standard HRTF. Surprisingly, only half of those with access to individual HRTFs are actually using them, and most would be willing to switch to a default HRTF set if one was established.
ER  -