Audio rendering engines are a cornerstone in offering a plausible and immersive experience for interactive virtual environments (IVEs). For virtual reality IVEs, a culmination of visuals, audio, interactive, and behavioral cues blend to form a user’s perception and cognition. However, implementing such IVEs incurs additional costs and resources beyond the scope of many labs. This contribution describes a set of three open-source computer-generated imagery interactive audiovisual scenes, including geometric, material, lighting, and post-processing implementation for relevant audio and visual cues. In addition, each IVE poses an audio-relevant task for users to perform throughout the environment, invoking cognitive processes for further psychological and behavioral research. The results of a small-scale case study are presented, which demonstrate the IVE design’s impact on user behavior along with scene profiling of selected acoustic attributes. The scene profiling highlights that different acoustic auralization attributes for IVEs may be needed as a combination of both the IVE’s physical design and the user task.

Authors: Robotham, Thomas; Rebmann, Daniela; Fintineanu-Anghelescu, Dominik O.; Raake, Alexander; Habets, Emanuël A. P.
Affiliations: International Audio Laboratories Erlangen; Fraunhofer Institut für Integrierte Schaltungen; Fraunhofer Institut für Integrierte Schaltungen; Audiovisual Technology Group, TU-Ilmenau; International Audio Laboratories Erlangen(See document for exact affiliation information.)
AES Conference: AES 2024 International Audio for Games Conference (April 2024)
Paper Number: 4
Publication Date: April 27, 2024
Subject: Audiovisual Virtual reality Interactive sound Immersive audio Spatial audio Acoustics Perception Behavior Cognition Multimodal Unity Evaluation

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