Getting HRTF from 3-D scan + acoustic simulation This question follows from Modelling propagation of sound wave by particle simulation

This last fortnight I have started experimenting with Binaural audio; it really blows everything else out of the water.

The main reason it hasn't taken off, I think, is that every individual needs to get their own HRTF calculated, which consists of sitting in a soundproof room with microphones in your ear canals, while something makes popping noises at thousands of locations around you.

I'm only aware of one service provider that may calculate your HRTF: http://www.physiol.usyd.edu.au/~simonc/hrtf_rec.htm  and they are in Australia!

I'm wondering whether a more practical method may emerge, which would involve taking a 3-D scan of one's head (maybe using something like http://www.david-3d.com/) and shipping it off for a heavy dose of distributed computing which would return HRTFs for that individual.

I wonder if we may see a day where people have their own HRTF data stored in the cloud, and can enjoy binaural sound on their iPods.

How far away is such a technology?  And other any other contenders for measuring HRTF?

π

PS could we possibly have some more tags like "binaural", "hrtf/hrir"
There are various school of thoughts about this. A German guy named Klaus Genuit came up with a parametric model of HRTFs that's based on the actual physcial geometry of head, shoulder, pinna, etc. He actually now runs a company that craeates binaural products and measurement gear, see for example
http://www.head-acoustics.de/downloads/publications/binaural_technology/DAGA_99_Physical_Modeling_of_individual_HRTFs.pdf

Based on this work you could potentially create individual HRTFs using a some 3D scanning scheme. I do vaguely remember a company coming doing exactly that for a bunch of people at my employer at the time. I didn't think the HRTFs that came out that way were particularly good but I didn't do a lot of work with them either.

Individualized HRTFs only help to a certain extent. Let's say you want to record a concert. You can do this binaurally using a dummy head. However, there is currently no way to convert this recording to your individual HRTFs after the fact, even if you have them.