{"id":678735,"date":"2020-07-25T13:04:03","date_gmt":"2020-07-25T20:04:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/?post_type=msr-research-item&p=678735"},"modified":"2020-08-20T15:16:38","modified_gmt":"2020-08-20T22:16:38","slug":"fast-acoustic-obstruction-with-pcd","status":"publish","type":"msr-research-item","link":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/publication\/fast-acoustic-obstruction-with-pcd\/","title":{"rendered":"Fast acoustic obstruction with proximity cost differencing (PCD)"},"content":{"rendered":"

Acoustic obstruction is a difficult challenge faced in virtual reality and games. Obstruction is the loss in audio loudness due to objects and doorways that intervene the line-of-sight between a sound source and listener. Visual obstruction using a single ray-cast is fast to compute, but too abrupt for audio, sounding obviously unrealistic. On the other hand, using a full wave simulation is accurate but computationally expensive, requiring pre-computation. In this paper, we try to balance the two extremes with a new heuristic approach (PCD) that is orders-of-magnitude faster than wave simulation and shows promise for evolving into a real-time technique. We show that PCD captures the qualitative behaviors expected from wave diffraction.<\/p>\n

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The proposed PCD algorithm for acoustic obstruction (middle row) is able to capture the qualitative variations from a small aperture compared to reference FDTD (bottom row) at more than 100 times speedup. In comparison, simple heuristics used in games today (top row) produce unrealistic results where a small pinhole can still transmit a large amount of energy, which results in easily audible artifacts.<\/p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Acoustic obstruction is a difficult challenge faced in virtual reality and games. Obstruction is the loss in audio loudness due to objects and doorways that intervene the line-of-sight between a sound source and listener. Visual obstruction using a single ray-cast is fast to compute, but too abrupt for audio, sounding obviously unrealistic. On the other 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