RoomWeaver is a Digital Waveguide Mesh (DWM) based Integrated Development Environment (IDE) style research tool, similar in appearance and functionality to other current acoustics software. The premise of RoomWeaver is to ease the development and application of DWM models for virtual acoustic spaces. This paper demonstrates the basic functionality of RoomWeaver’s 3D modelling and Room Impulse Response (RIR) generation capabilities. A case study is presented to show how new DWM types can be quickly developed and easily tested using RoomWeaver’s built in plug-in architecture through the implementation of a hybrid-type mesh. This hybrid mesh is comprised of efficient, yet geometrically inflexible, finite difference DWM elements and the geometrically versatile, but slow, wave-based DWM elements. The two types of DWM are interfaced using a KW-pipe and this hybrid model exhibits a significant increase in execution speed and a smaller memory footprint than standard wave-based DWM models and allows nontrivial geometries to be successfully modelled.

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The digital waveguide mesh (DWM) and related finite difference time domain techniques offer significant promise for room acoustics simulation problems. However high resolution 3-D DWMs of large spaces remain beyond the capabilities of current desktop based computers, due to prohibitively long run-times and large memory requirements. This paper examines how hybrid room impulse response synthesis might be used to better enable virtual environment simulation through the use of otherwise computationally expensive DWM models. This is facilitated through the introduction of the RenderAIR virtual environment simulation system and comparison with both real-world measurements and more established modelling techniques. Results demonstrate good performance against acoustic benchmarks and significant computational savings when a 2-D DWM is used as part of an appropriate hybridization strategy.

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