Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1521235
when consuming music, films, or playing games. Many companies revert to synthetically generated P-HRTF's with the help of machine learning providing more efficient solutions. Furthermore, its accuracy is still highly debatable among the research community. The latter is more aimed at the end user to ensure more accurate spatial rendering at the point of content consumption. However, it can also be a useful tool for a sound designer or a mixing engineer. Interactive Audio for Extended Reality In game engines, 3D geometry is commonly modelled for both graphics and physics and its simplified representations of objects lend themselves to also being deployed for audio in order to replicate the reflections and occlusions associated with an object or surface, although differences between an object's collision and acoustic properties can create difficulties. To emulate an acoustic profile, a given object intended to interact with audio needs to convey two parameters for the degree of reflectivity and the resulting timbre. For volumetric purposes, a third class of geometry describes sound-area meshes and effect-area meshes to define sound emitter zones and reverberation parameters, respectively. VR endeavours to operate similarly, but with 'presence'—sense of being there—is a key objective. The general conventions of sound design and implementation practices in both are largely the same as games, identified aspects of user-perceived immersive audio 'quality' in virtual environments, including timbre, both location and dynamic accuracy, loudness balance, auditory spaciousness, reverberation, and artefacts. However, with the emergence of mixed reality, new opportunities and challenges are emerging. In this medium, the virtual content is presented within one's immediate real-world surroundings which sets a different level of expectation from the user's point of view, requiring acoustic cues more representative of the specific real world around the user. Virtual-Acoustic Considerations It is well understood that aural perception of the surrounding environment is a function of its geometry, scale, and absorption. The acoustic fingerprint of a space, including the objects within it, is often represented by its room impulse response (RIR), but it is complicated by the observer's six-degrees-of-freedom (6DoF)