Three-dimensional (or spatial) audio is a growing research field that plays a key role in realizing immersive communication in many of today’s applications for teleconferencing, entertainment, gaming, navigation guidance, and virtual reality (VR)/augmented reality (AR). Technologies in spatial sound capture and binaural recording are becoming an add-on module to our mobile devices to capture the surrounding soundscape, pickup directional and ambient cues, and create an immersive 3D audio media for playback.

We are seeing a surge in research activities and applications that rely on digital spatial audio processing and rendering over loudspeakers (stereo, wave field synthesis, ambisonics) and headphones, and seeing new emerging fields of mobile spatial audio, personal assisted listening, and spatial audio for VR/AR. New developments in graphical processing units and multi-core processors are accelerating the pace for real-time spatial audio processing, and new techniques that can lead to high quality and immersive spatial audio reproduction.