Article
Auditory Distance Perception in a Real and Virtual Walk-Through Environment (en)
* Presenting author
Abstract:
The use of virtual reality (VR) in hearing science allows psychoacoustic studies to be conducted under controlled conditions, enabling experimental manipulation of isolated physical cues while closely resembling real-life scenarios, ideally leading to more ecologically valid results. However, before conducting sophisticated experiments in VR, it is important to determine the extent to which virtualization can affect the results of psychoacoustic measurements or whether known results and effects from the real world can be reproduced in VR environments. To this end, we investigated auditory distance perception in a real room and its virtual replica in a walk-through scenario. Participants walked along a defined path and had to determine which of five loudspeakers positioned at different distances was playing sound. The VR environment combines a graphically rendered 3D replica of the room with an efficient real-time room acoustic simulation for six-degrees-of-freedom binaural rendering, presented through a head-mounted display and extra-aural headphones. The results provide insight into the effect of virtualization on auditory distance estimation and whether experiments on auditory distance perception in VR lead to results comparable to those obtained in real-life scenarios.