Effects of auditory information consistency and room acoustic cues on presence in virtual environments

Journal article, 2008

The influence of room acoustic cues and the consistency between sound information and sound specialization on the sense of presence within an auditory virtual environment has been explored. Presence is to great extent determined by spatial factors in sonic environments but as in the case of realism, source information or source content also is a crucial component of presence. It was observed that the addition of room acoustic cues resulted in higher presence ratings. The effect can be explained by the fact that adding reverb increases externalization in headphone-based systems, which in turn is believed to increase naturalness and presence. Significant effect can be observed, when comparing the increases in presence when adding room acoustic cues and altering the type of sound source. This suggests that a good sound design, which is consistent with the dynamics of the specialization, can be beneficial as increasing the quality of the specialization.