Performance and Perceived Realism in Rasterized 3D Sound Propagation for Interactive Virtual Environments

Sammanfattning: Background. 3D sound propagation is important for immersion and realism in interactive and dynamic virtual environments. However, this is difficult to model in a physically accurate manner under real-time constraints. Computer graphics techniques are used in acoustics research to increase performance, yet there is little utilization of the especially efficient rasterization techniques, possibly due to concerns of physical accuracy. Fortunately, psychoacoustics have shown that perceived realism does not equate physical accuracy. This indicates that perceptually realistic and high-performance 3D sound propagation may be achievable with rasterization techniques. Objectives. This thesis investigates whether 3D sound propagation can be modelled with high performance and perceived realism using rasterization-based techniques. Methods. A rasterization-based solution for 3D sound propagation is implemented. Its perceived realism is measured using psychoacoustic evaluations. Its performance is analyzed through computation time measurements with varying sound source and triangle count, and theoretical calculations of memory consumption. The performance and perceived realism of the rasterization-based solution is compared with an existing solution. Results. The rasterization-based solution shows both higher performance and perceived realism than the existing solution. Conclusions. 3D sound propagation can be modelled with high performance and perceived realism using rasterization-based techniques. Thus, rasterized 3D sound propagation may provide efficient, low-cost, perceptually realistic 3D audio for areas where immersion and perceptual realism are important, such as video games, serious games, live entertainment events, architectural design, art production and training simulations.