Investigating the Plausibility of Spatially Interpolated Binaural Room Impulse Responses

Bau D, Himmelein H, Lambert J, Lübeck T, Pörschmann C. Investigating the Plausibility of Spatially Interpolated Binaural Room Impulse Responses. In: AES 2024 International Conference on Audio for Virtual and Augmented Reality. Audio Engineering Society; 2024. Paper 9. Available from: https://aes.org/publications/elibrary-page/?id=22658

@inproceedings{Bau2024_22658,
  author = {Bau, David and Himmelein, Hendrik and Lambert, Jannik and Lübeck, Tim and Pörschmann, Christoph},
  title = {{Investigating the Plausibility of Spatially Interpolated Binaural Room Impulse Responses}},
  booktitle = {AES 2024 International Conference on Audio for Virtual and Augmented Reality},
  note = {Paper 9},
  year = {2024},
  month = aug,
  publisher = {Audio Engineering Society},
  url = {https://aes.org/publications/elibrary-page/?id=22658}
}

TY  - CPAPER
TI  - Investigating the Plausibility of Spatially Interpolated Binaural Room Impulse Responses
AU  - Bau, David
AU  - Himmelein, Hendrik
AU  - Lambert, Jannik
AU  - Lübeck, Tim
AU  - Pörschmann, Christoph
T2  - AES 2024 International Conference on Audio for Virtual and Augmented Reality
M1  - Paper 9
PY  - 2024
DA  - 2024/08/05
UR  - https://aes.org/publications/elibrary-page/?id=22658
PB  - Audio Engineering Society
LA  - en
AB  - Rendering virtual acoustic environments with measured binaural room impulse responses (BRIRs) can provide a high level of realism. However, the measurement of BRIRs for multiple head orientations is typically tedious. Appropriate interpolation techniques can lower the demand for spatial resolution and thus reduce the measurement effort. A recent study compared several non-parametric interpolation strategies for very sparse multi-orientational BRIRs. The results suggest a high overall quality for BRIRs interpolated from sparse sets with angular resolutions of 30? and 40?. The present study investigates the realism of such sparsely measured BRIR sets for mixed reality (XR) applications compared to densely measured BRIRs in a plausibility experiment. The participants had to decide if a presented sound source was a real loudspeaker or a headphone simulation, only using their listening expectations as a inner reference. The results indicate that participants could not reliably identify the simulations for either dense or interpolated BRIRs. For dense BRIRs, participants responses were essentially random, suggesting they were guessing. For interpolated BRIRs, results indicate that participants were able to detect small sensory differences.
ER  -