International Research Journal of Engineering and Technology (IRJET)
e-ISSN: 2395-0056
Volume: 13 Issue: 06 | Jun 2026
p-ISSN: 2395-0072
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A Survey and Taxonomy of Real-Time Spatial Audio Technologies for Interactive Game Environments Anubhav Patil1, Prof. Sunny Nahar2 1Master of Computer Applications, Vivekanand Education Society's Institute of Technology, Mumbai, India 2Assistant Professor, Vivekanand Education Society's Institute of Technology, Mumbai, India
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------***------------------------------------------------------------------------------photos on consumer hardware. Many commercial games, however, still employ much the same kind of simplified digital environments, much more is required than realistic models and approximations that were developed decades graphics. Music and sound are also important and building ago. This mismatch has been described by several believable sound environments is critically dependent on a researchers as an "immersion gap", where the degree of proper simulation of sound propagation and interaction in realism in the visual domain has grown considerably while complex virtual environments. This paper compares and the auditory domain has been comparatively little [4, 5]. In contrasts all of the spatial audio technologies that are recent surveys, similar assessments of spatial audio employed in existing modern game engines, with the origins features in virtual environments have been investigated. of the basic research in room acoustics and spatial audio More specifically, Melchior et al. [3] assessed the spatial since the early 1960s. This work is a systematic survey and audio formats and the possibility of spatial reproduction conceptual taxonomy, and did not include any original on immersive platforms. Although their attention is mostly empirical experiments. on documenting the existing production workflow and consumer delivery capabilities of standard virtual reality Key Words: Spatial Audio, Game Development, systems, this paper extends their analysis by compiling Adaptive Rectangular Decomposition, Beam Tracing, and formalizing the prior work to develop a formal Ray Tracing, HRTF Personalization, SAMOSA, comparative taxonomy of the underlying physical Presence, Head-Related Transfer Function, Sound propagation mechanisms (geometric, wave-based, and Propagation, Wave-Based Acoustics, Binaural hybrid), and proposes a conceptual implementation of a Rendering, Perceptual Evaluation, Deep Learning real-time semantic-acoustic pipeline (SAMOSA+ARD), that Audio. would enable the use of dynamic scene geometry, as well as a proposed structured evaluation protocol. 1. INTRODUCTION
Abstract - To immerse the player fully in interactive
The challenge isn't a lack of understanding of acoustic principals. The location and characteristics of sounds are determined by human beings with a combination of perceptual cues such as Interaural Time Difference (ITD), Interaural Level Difference (ILD), and the spectral filtering effects due to the head and torso and outer ears. All these effects are summarized in the HRTF (Head-Related Transfer Function). Accurately reproducing these cues in real-time becomes increasingly difficult as the sound sources, listeners and environments are constantly changing. Consequently, spatial audio has typically been a by-product of computational efficiency and perceptual realism, and not a key design goal [6, 7].
Music and sound are more than just a pretty face to adorn a game; they're a part of the total experience and the experience of a player who plays in a virtual world. In many contexts, information is conveyed prior to visual information. Someone walking down a narrow stone passage can hear approaching footsteps well before they see the person coming, and an open courtyard will immediately give the sense of scale when a player walks into a large cathedral with reverberation and echo. In the absence of these auditory signals, when exaggerated or impossible to perform, the sense of presence is diminished and gives the player the realization that they are interacting with a virtual reality, and not a believable world [1, 2].
But this is beginning to change, with a number of technological trends bringing a resurgence of interest in spatial audio research. The swift advancement of Extended Reality (XR) technologies such as Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR) are significant factors. Visually, the amount of information available to the user is limited, which makes sound a more critical form of information for
While the computer graphics have made a remarkable development in the last few decades, the spatial audio has not progressed in the same pace. Today's game engines can produce highly detailed environments via real-time rasterization and even path-traced lighting that can rival
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