A Scalable Spatial Sound Rendering System

The spatial rendering of sound in Virtual Reality systems can quickly become a computationally expensive process. The author proposes a Spatial Sound rendering system that allows for the graceful degradation of spatial quality based upon scaling parameters. The parameters are a combination of both physical and perceptual attributes. The Scalable Spatial Sound Rendering system is divided into three User-Profiles; Professional, Prosumer and Consumer, where each profile is composed of a number of varying levels of quality. Typical applications for this scalable framework include Mobile-VR systems and Personal VR systems based upon standard multimedia PCs. One of the main advantages of this scalable architecture is that the audio content is only created once and is appropriately scaled for the end user – write once read many.