Frame-independent and parallel method for 3D audio real-time rendering on mobile devices

Abstract

As 3D audio is a fundamental medium of virtual reality (VR), 3D audio real-time rendering technique is essential for the implementation of VR, especially on the mobile devices. While constrained by the limited computational power, the computation load is too high to implement 3D audio real-time rendering on the mobile devices. To solve this problem, we propose a frame-independent and parallel method of framing convolution, to parallelize process of 3D audio rendering using head-related transfer function (HRTF). In order to refrain from the dependency of overlap-add convolution over the adjacent frames, the data of convolution result is added on the final results of the two adjacent frames. We found our method could reduce the calculation time of 3D audio rendering significantly. The results were 0.74 times, 0.5 times and 0.36 times the play duration of si03.wav (length of 27 s), with Snapdragon 801, Kirin 935 and Helio X10 Turbo, respectively.