Ambisonics Directional Room Impulse Response as a new Convention of the Spatially Oriented Format for Acoustics

Room Impulse Response (RIR) measurements are one of the most common ways to capture acoustic characteristics
of a given space. When performed with microphone arrays, the RIRs inherently contain directional information.
Due to the growing interest in Ambisonics and audio for Virtual Reality, new spherical microphone arrays recently
hit the market. Accordingly, several databases of Directional RIRs (DRIRs) measured with such arrays, referred to
as Ambisonics DRIRs, have been publicly released. However, there is no format consensus among databases. With
the aim of improving interoperability, we propose an exchange format for Ambisonics DRIRs, as a new Spatially
Oriented Format for Acoustics (SOFA) convention. As a use-case, some existing databases have been converted
and released following our proposal.