Efficient, compelling and immersive VR audio experience using Scene Based Audio/Higher Order Ambisonics

For a fully immersive and compelling VR experience, the acoustic-illusion of being 'present' in the virtual world must be created. To achieve this illusion two aspects are compulsory: (1) authentic spatial audio production and (2) the need to track and adapt the audio scene to the listener's head position and orientation. This paper shows how Scene-based audio (SBA), often synonymous with Higher Order Ambisonics (HOA), is ideal for VR because its ease of acoustic capture, offline content creation, post-production, transmission and interactive rendering. Compared to object-based audio, the rendering complexity is much lower for SBA. Also, SBA can offer higher and more coherent spatial fidelity when compared to channel based audio. One of the advantages of SBA is flexible rendering, which means that the same audio stream can be rendered to various speaker formats including binaural rendering for headphone consumption. The paper discusses the need for efficient SBA compression for VR content delivery, and presents MPEG-H as an efficient and versatile delivery system for SBA. For a personalized VR experience, accurate binaural rendering is essential. SBA can be efficiently binauralized. Its number of convolutions is proportional to the number of HOA coefficients, rather than proportional to the number of virtual loudspeakers. This means that SBA can render to a high number of virtual loudspeakers without impacting the binauralization computation cost. Furthermore, to improve the spatial perception, SBA binauralization can utilize grids of ideally positioned virtual loudspeakers based on platonic solids or otherwise regularly spaced loudspeaker configurations that are impractical in reality and unsupported in channel-based audio formats. Interactive soundfield rotation in real time is indispensable for creating VR experience. We show how SBA can be rotated and even further enhanced with other user-controlled effects, such as zooming. The paper will discuss use cases to demonstrate the capture, processing, and playback of SBA and will show potential pitfalls and design strategies for an end-to-end spatial audio system for VR. The authors will then conclude that SBA is a robust and compelling audio format for VR, and that SBA can be easily distributed via broadcast or OTT for real-time end consumer use.