Ambisonics Depth Extensions For Six Degrees Of Freedom

Ambisonics and rotation matrices are a natural fit for 360 video and virtual, augmented or mixed reality experiences where spatial audio representation and transformation are required. As such, ambisonics has been widely adopted in AR/VR production workflows. For fully immersive experiences, however, extensions to support arbitrary six-degree-of-freedom listener movement in a sound scene are necessary. This paper introduces extensions to ambisonics formats to support authoring, encoding, decoding, and rendering depth information to enable full 3D immersive audio suitable for true 3D, volumetric, or light field video. The paper describes ambisonic decoding architectures that support depth rendering and 6DoF with both legacy ambisonic content and the proposed encoding extensions and discusses an end-to-end solution for spatial audio transmission or streaming.