Distributed sound rendering for distributed virtual environments

A distributed virtual environment allows remote users to communicate and interact with each other in a 3D environment through networks, in particular the Internet. Although existing work mainly focuses on visual communications, there is an increasing interest on audio communications too. The sound generation process is to modulate the input sound sources from the remote usersor from some autonomous objects by the reverberation of the environment to produce the output sound. There are a few sound rendering methods proposed, with different applications, such as architectural simulation and online games. To improve the rendering performance, some of these methods employ parallel hardware architectures or dedicated sound processing hardware. In this paper, we propose a distributed sound rendering architecture for realtime sound rendering in a distributed virtual environment with moving observers and sound sources. We also propose the distributed prioritized sound rendering method to improve the rendering performance while preserving the perceptual quality. The new architecture has the advantages that it is based on low cost PCs and is scalable.