Virtual reality (VR) is increasingly important for exploring the real world, which has partially moved to virtual workplaces. In order to create immersive presence in a simulated scene for humans, VR needs to reproduce spatial audio that describes three-dimensional acoustic characteristics in the counterpart physical environment. When the user moves, this reproduction should be dynamically updated, which provides practical challenges because the bandwidth for continuously transmitting audio and video scene data may be limited. This paper proposes an interpolation approach for dynamic spatial audio reproduction using acoustic characteristics of direction and reverberation at limited numbers of positions, which are represented using a first order Ambisonics encoding of the room impulse response (RIR), called the directional RIR (DRIR). We decompose two known DRIRs into reflection components, before interpolating early dominant components for DRIR synthesis and utilizing DRIR recordings for accuracy evaluation. Results indicate that the most accurate interpolation is obtained by the proposed method over two comparative approaches, particularly in a simulated small room where most direction of arrival estimation errors of early components are below five degrees. These findings suggest precise interpolated DRIRs with limited data using the proposed approach, which is vital for dynamic spatial audio reproduction for VR applications.

As broadcasting environments change rapidly to digital, user requirements for next-generation services that surpass the current HDTV service quality become more demanding. The next-generation of broadcasting services will change from HD to UHD and from 5.1 channel audio to more than 10 audio channels, including a height channel for a high quality realistic broadcasting service. In accordance with the estimated trends of future broadcasting services, we propose a 10.2 channel audio format for a Korean UHDTV broadcasting service. It can create almost similar spatial sound images as 22.2 channel audio with half the number of speakers. In this paper, we propose a 10.2 channel audio acquisition system for the creation of UHDTV content, and measurements and preliminary evaluation are carried out to determine whether the performance is acceptable for broadcasting.