A Loudspeaker-Embedded Design for an Immersive Videoconferencing System with Large Screens

Traditional videoconferencing systems that work on the basis of face-to-face configurations allow the use of standard 2-channel stereo loudspeakers in order to achieve sound-image localization by the users. In contrast, immersive systems that do not constraint the users to a face-to-face viewpoint introduce new challenges in their acoustic design. This paper discusses the major problems that appear in a novel videoconferencing system in which the use of ordinary 2-channel loudspeakers is not suitable to achieve sound-image localization due to the inherent characteristics of the room space. In efforts to overcome these problems, a loudspeaker-embedded design is proposed and demonstrated with numerical simulations and experiments that show the steady-state sound field radiated by this new loudspeaker system.