Sound perception in virtual environments

Abstract

Virtual environments have been developing and changing the understanding of a space by means design, perception and usage. This study aims to contribute to the literature on the improvement of the auditory perception and cognition of virtual spaces used for education, training, and gaming purposes. This study proposes to offer a realistic representation of soundscapes in virtual environments according to spatial qualities instead of misleading synthetic sounds by integrating acoustical simulations with the immersive environment and questioning the experience of a regular user. The study explores the effects of acoustically simulated and immersive virtual soundscape design methods on auditory perception through changing forms and materials by series of cognitive experiments. The results revealed that the participants achieve more accurate results of source-localization, self-localization, and distance guessing in an immersive environment than in the simulated environment. Also, they were more aware of the soundwalk route, spent more time on tasks, and evaluated the experience more positively in an immersive environment compared to simulations. Despite the placement of the auralizations from the simulations as sound sources in immersive environments, there is still a lack of auditory representation of spatial qualities compared to the accurate calculation of acoustical parameters in a simulated environment.