Audio reproduction in virtual reality cinemas – Position paper

Reed, Luke; Phelps, Philip

Abstract

Virtual Reality (VR) and 360 film have caught the attention of audiences and content creators and emerged as a new media, however, the market penetration of VR and head mounted hardware has remained slow despite the availability of more affordable mobile options. This has resulted in some audiences turning to VR cinemas, festivals and out-of-home exhibitions. Creating affordable, scalable VR cinemas presents a number of challenges and many of the decisions taken in both developing and facilitating these curated exhibitions directly impact audience’s reception of spatial audio soundtracks. This workshop position paper looks to discuss the potential issues and future solutions in the use of current synchronous exhibition applications, the competing formats, standardised Head Related Transfer Functions, headphone build/colourisation, and the on-boarding process.

• Presentation Conference Type: Conference Paper (published)
• Conference Name: 2019 IEEE Conference on Virtual Reality and 3D User Interfaces (VR)
• Start Date: Mar 23, 2019
• End Date: Mar 27, 2019
• Acceptance Date: Feb 19, 2019
• Online Publication Date: Aug 15, 2019
• Publication Date: Aug 15, 2019
• Publisher: Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
• Pages: 1513-1516
• Series ISSN: 2642-5254
• Book Title: 2019 IEEE Conference on Virtual Reality and 3D User Interfaces (VR)
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1109/VR.2019.8797904
• Keywords: cinematic VR, 360 film, spatial audio, 3D audio, binaural, ambisonics, object based audio, VR cinemas, exhibition, playback software, HRTF, headphones, on-boarding
• Public URL: https://uwe-repository.worktribe.com/output/852120