HOBA-VR: HRTF On Demand for Binaural Audio in immersive virtual reality environments

One of the main challenges of spatial audio rendering in headphones is the personalization of the so-called head-related transfer functions (HRTFs). HRTFs capture the listener’s acoustic effects supporting immersive and realistic virtual reality (VR) contexts. This e-brief presents the HOBA-VR framework that provides a full-body VR experience with personalized HRTFs that were individually selected on demand based on anthropometric data (pinnae shapes). The proposed WAVH transfer format allows a flexible management of this customization process. A screening test aiming to evaluate user localization performance with selected HRTFs for a non-visible spatialized audio source is also provided. Accordingly, is might be possible to create a user profile that contains also individual non-acoustic factors such as localizability, satisfaction, and confidence.