Virtual Auditory Display on a Smartphone for High-Resolution Acoustic Space by Remote Rendering

Abstract

Virtual Auditory Display (VAD) is a system, which displays acoustic spatial information toward two ears. There are several variations of construction of VAD system. The most popular system is binaural system with headphones. Listener often moves his/her heads unconsciously in listening. Therefore, the rendering acoustic space should be responsive to head movement. Moreover, VAD system responsive to head movement can improve the accuracy of sound localization and the realism of the rendering acoustic space. In contrast, the binaural VAD system has been investigated as a standalone system. However, it is important to apply VAD system to future communication system via the Internet. We have developed a new auditory display system (VAD-NR), in which acoustic rendering responsive to listener's head movement is performed at a remote server via the computer network. From the previous evaluation of the system in a network in our laboratory, the system delay of acoustic spatial rendering was about 100 ms. The delay was almost equivalent to the detection threshold of system delay of a common VAD system (75 ms). In this paper, we conducted another experiment in the environment of a computer network between China and Japan. The system latency and the sound localization performance were measured and evaluated.