Distributed sound rendering for interactive virtual environments

Sound rendering deals with adding environmental effects to localized sound sources. There are a few sound rendering methods proposed, with different targets of application, such as architectural simulation and modeling of multi-user interactive environments. To improve the rendering performance, some of these methods employ parallel hardware architectures or dedicated sound processing hardware. In this paper, we propose a distributed sound rendering architecture for real-time sound rendering in an interactive environment with moving observers and sound sources. We also propose the distributed prioritized sound rendering method to improve the rendering performance while preserving the perceptual quality. The new architecture has the advantages that it is based on low cost PCs and is scalable.