Effects of the order of Ambisonics on localization for different reverberant conditions in a novel 3D acoustic virtual reality system

Hermes Sampedro Llopis, Finnur Pind, Cheol-Ho Jeong
2019 Proceedings of the ICA congress  
This study presents an acoustic virtual reality technique based on geometrical acoustics simulations and high-order Ambisonics. The technique relies on pre-calculated B-format impulse responses in a grid of receiver positions, that are decoded into a virtual array of loudspeakers which follows the listener during runtime. The virtual loudspeaker signals are synthesized for a binaural representation via head-related transfer functions. This tool is assessed in terms of sound localization. The
more » ... and 2nd order Ambisonics are compared while visual and head movement conditions are varied, to see if they affect the localization performance. Moreover, this study tests the localization in full 3D challenging reverberant conditions (0.6 to 2.0 s). Results show that significant outperformance of the 2nd order technique over the 1st order is found in all head movement and visual conditions. When using 2nd order Ambisonics, allowing head movement and visual are provided, sound localization error is found to be less than the just-noticeable difference.
doi:10.18154/rwth-conv-239043 fatcat:c5w7cqbr4jgqzenmxoxpzciova