MIA: Modelling Individual Acoustics for Plausible Extended Realities

MIA is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellowship (No 101201118) hosted at the Audio Experience Design lab, Dyson School of Design Engineering, Imperial College London. Sound in extended reality (XR) is rendered using Head-Related Transfer Functions (HRTFs) — digital filters that encode how a listener's unique anatomy shapes the sounds they hear. Accurate individual HRTFs require costly specialised hardware, and as a result, fewer than 3% of XR applications use personalised spatial audio. MIA addresses this gap using probabilistic models to deliver convincing personalised spatial audio without the measurement overhead. The project combines psychoacoustic experimentation, computational modelling, and XR integration to work toward a practical, widely adoptable personalisation solution. Funded by the European Union under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No 101201118.