Spatial audio processing for interactive TV services

FascinatE is a European funded project that aims at developing a system to allow end users to interactively navigate around a video panorama showing a live event, with the accompanying audio automatically changing to match the selected view. The audiovisual content will be adapted to the users particular kind of device, covering anything from a mobile handset equipped with headphones to an immersive panoramic display connected with large loudspeaker setup. We describe how to handle audio content in the FascinatE context, covering simple stereo through to spatial sound fields. This will be performed by a mixture of Higher Order Ambisonics and Wave Field Synthesis. Our paper focuses on the greatest challenges for both techniques when capturing, transmitting and rendering the audio scene. 1