Visibility-Based Beam Tracing for Soundfield Rendering

In this paper we present a visibility-based beam tracing solution for the simulation of the acoustics of environment that makes use of a projective geometry representation. More specifically, projective geometry turns out to be useful for the precomputation of the visibility among all the reflectors in the environment. The simulation engine has a straightforward application in the rendering of the acoustics of virtual environments using loudspeaker arrays. More specifically, the acoustic wavefield is conceived as a superposition of acoustic beams, whose parameters (i.e. origin, orientation and aperture) are computed using the fast beam tracing methodology presented here. This information is processed by the rendering engine to compute spatial filters to be applied to the loudspeakers within the array. Simulative results show that an accurate simulation of the acoustic wavefield can be obtained using this approach.