Abstract
Realistic sound effect synchronized with visual rendering can greatly improve the immersive sense of a user in virtual reality (VR). Prior work focuses on sound propagation in air without considering the characteristics of underwater, thus cannot be directly extended for underwater scenarios. This paper proposes a novel method for simulating sound propagation in underwater scenes. We combine the normal mode method in oceanography with an improved ray tracing method to effectively calculate underwater sound propagation. A normal mode method is adapted for sound pressure calculation in the low-frequency domain. In the high-frequency domain, by considering the characteristics of underwater, we propose a threshold-based improved ray tracing method to compute the impulse response, bringing results closer to real values at higher efficiency. We sample the possible listener positions and use backward ray tracing to perform interpolation and extrapolation at runtime. Our simulation results are realistic at interactive rendering rates for scenes with moving sources. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time that a sound propagation model tailored for underwater environment is presented in the field of VR. Various experiments in underwater scenes validated our method.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Alien, J.: Image method for efficiently simulating small-room acoustics. J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 65(S1), 943–950 (1998)
Antani, L., Manocha, D.: Aural proxies and directionally-varying reverberation for interactive sound propagation in virtual environments. IEEE Trans. Vis. Comput. Graph. 19(4), 567–575 (2013)
Aretz, M.: Combined wave and ray based room acoustic simulations of small rooms: challenges and limitations on the way to realistic simulation results. Ph.D. thesis, RWTH Aachen University, Aachen (2012)
Cao, C., Ren, Z., Schissler, C., Manocha, D., Zhou, K.: Interactive sound propagation with bidirectional path tracing. ACM Trans. Graph. 35(6), 180:1–180:11 (2016)
Drumm, I., Lam, Y.: The adaptive beam-tracing algorithm. J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 107(3), 1405–1412 (2000)
Ellis, D.D., Vance Crowe, D.: Bistatic reverberation calculations using a three-dimensional scattering function. J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 89(5), 2207–2214 (1999)
Evans, R.B.: Stepwise coupled mode scattering of ambient noise by a cylindrically symmetric seamount. J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 119(1), 161–167 (2006)
Fornberg, B.: The pseudospectral method: accurate representation of interfaces in elastic wave calculations. Geophysics 53(5), 625–637 (1988)
Gensane, M.: Sea surface scattering strength: theory versus experiments and Chapman–Harris formula. Acta Acust. United Acust. 88(5), 630–633 (2002)
Gumerov, N.A., Ramani, D.: A broadband fast multipole accelerated boundary element method for the three dimensional Helmholtz equation. J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 125(1), 191–205 (2009)
Hampel, S., Langer, S., Cisilino, A.P.: Coupling boundary elements to a raytracing procedure. Int. J. Numer. Methods Eng. 73(3), 427–445 (2010)
James, D., Barbic, J., Pai, D.: Precomputed acoustic transfer: output-sensitive, accurate sound generation for geometrically complex vibration sources. ACM Trans. Graph. 25(3), 987–995 (2006)
Knobles, D.P., Stotts, S.A., Koch, R.A.: Low frequency coupled mode sound propagation over a continental shelf. J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 113(2), 781–787 (2003)
Laine, S., Siltanen, S., Lokki, T., Savioja, L.: Accelerated beam tracing algorithm. Appl. Acoust. 70(1), 172–181 (2009)
Liu, S., Liu, J.: Outdoor sound propagation based on adaptive FDTD-PE. In: IEEE Conference on Virtual Reality and 3D User Interfaces, pp. 859–867 (2020)
Liu, S., Manocha, D.: Sound synthesis, propagation, and rendering: a survey. arXiv: 2011.05538 (2020)
Markovic, D., Antonacci, F., Sarti, A., Tubaro, S.: 3D beam tracing based on visibility lookup for interactive acoustic modeling. IEEE Trans. Vis. Comput. Graph. 22(10), 2262–2274 (2016)
Mechel, F.: Improved mirror source method in roomacoustics. J. Sound Vib. 256(5), 873–940 (2002)
Mehra, R., Antani, L., Kim, S., Manocha, D.: Source and listener directivity for interactive wave-based sound propagation. IEEE Trans. Vis. Comput. Graph. 20(4), 495–503 (2014)
Mehra, R., Raghuvanshi, N., Antani, L., Chandak, A., Curtis, S., Manocha, D.: Wave-based sound propagation in large open scenes using an equivalent source formulation. ACM Trans. Graph. 32(2), 19:1–19:13 (2013)
Micah, T., Anish, C., Qi, M., Christian, L., Carl, S., Dinesh, M.: Guided multiview ray tracing for fast auralization. IEEE Trans. Vis. Comput. Graph. 18(11), 1797–1810 (2012)
Mo, Q., Yeh, H., Manocha, D.: Tracing analytic ray curves for light and sound propagation in non-linear media. IEEE Trans. Vis. Comput. Graph. 22(11), 2493–2509 (2015)
Porter, M.B.: The KRAKEN Normal Mode Program (2008)
Raghuvanshi, N.: Interactive physically-based sound simulation. Ph.D. thesis, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (2010)
Raghuvanshi, N., Narain, R., Lin, M.C.: Efficient and accurate sound propagation using adaptive rectangular decomposition. IEEE Trans. Vis. Comput. Graph. 15(5), 789–801 (2009)
Raghuvanshi, N., Snyder, J.: Parametric wave field coding for precomputed sound propagation. ACM Trans. Graph. 33(4), 38:1–38:11 (2014)
Raghuvanshi, N., Snyder, J.: Parametric directional coding for precomputed sound propagation. ACM Trans. Graph. 37(4), 108:1–108:11 (2018)
Raghuvanshi, N., Snyder, J., Mehra, R., Lin, M., Govindaraju, N.: Precomputed wave simulation for real-time sound propagation of dynamic sources in complex scenes. ACM Trans. Graph. 29(4), 68:1–68:11 (2010)
Rojas, D., Cowan, B., Kapralos, B., Colllins, K., Dubrowski, A.: The effect of sound on visual realism perception and task completion time in a cel-shaded serious gaming virtual environment. In: The Seventh International Workshop on Quality of Multimedia Experience (2015)
Rycroft, M.: Computational electrodynamics, the finite-difference time-domain method. J. Atmos. Terr. Phys. 5(15), 629–670 (2005)
Sakamoto, S., Ushiyama, A., Nagatomo, H.: Numerical analysis of sound propagation in rooms using the finite difference time domain method. J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 120(5), 3008 (2006)
Schissler, C., Mehra, R., Manocha, D.: High-order diffraction and diffuse reflections for interactive sound propagation in large environments. ACM Trans. Graph. 33(4), 39:1–39:12 (2014)
Tang, Z., Morales, N., Manocha, D.: Dynamic sound field synthesis for speech and music optimization. In: ACM Multimedia, pp. 1–9 (2018)
Wang, J., James, D.: Kleinpat: optimal mode conflation for time-domain precomputation of acoustic transfer. ACM Trans. Graph. 38(4), 122:1–122:12 (2019)
Wang, Y., Safavi-Naeini, S., Chaudhuri, S.K.: A hybrid technique based on combining ray tracing and FDTD methods for site-specific modeling of indoor radio wave propagation. IEEE Trans. Antennas Propag. 48(5), 743–754 (2000)
Yang, Y., Li, Y.: Parabolic equation method coupled with galerkin normal wave solution for underwater acoustic propagation calculation. Acta Oceanol. Sin. 29(6), 33–39 (2007)
Yee, K.S.: Numerical solution of initial boundary value problems involving Maxwell’s equations in isotropic media. IEEE Trans. Antennas Propag. 14(3), 302–307 (1966)
Yeh, H., Mehra, R., Ren, Z., Antani, L., Manocha, D., Lin, M.: Wave-ray coupling for interactive sound propagation in large complex scenes. ACM Trans. Graph. 32(6), 165:1–165:11 (2013)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Ethics declarations
Conflict of interest
The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest. This work was partly supported by the Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant Nos. 62072328 and 61672375.
Additional information
Publisher's Note
Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Supplementary Information
Below is the link to the electronic supplementary material.
Supplementary material 1 (mp4 18443 KB)
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Ding, R., Liu, S. Underwater sound propagation for virtual environments. Vis Comput 37, 2797–2807 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00371-021-02175-6
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00371-021-02175-6