Auralization is a powerful tool to increase the realism and sense of immersion in Virtual Reality environments. The Head Related Transfer Function (HRTF) filters commonly used for auralization are non-individualized, as obtaining individualized HRTFs poses very serious practical difficulties. It is therefore extremely important to understand to what extent this hinders sound perception. In this paper, we address this issue from a learning perspective. In a set of experiments, we observed that mere exposure to virtual sounds processed with generic HRTF did not improve the subjects’ performance in sound source localization, but short training periods involving active learning and feedback led to significantly better results. We propose that using auralization with non-individualized HRTF should always be preceded by a learning period.

Authors: Mendonça, Catarina, Santos, Jorge, Campos, Guilherme; Dias, Paulo; Vieira, José; Ferreira, João
Affiliations: University of Aveiro, Aveiro, Portugal; University of Minho, Minho, Portugal(See document for exact affiliation information.)
AES Convention: 129 (November 2010) Paper Number: 8266
Publication Date: November 4, 2010
Subject: Binaural Audio

Click to purchase paper as a non-member or you can login as an AES member to see more options.

No AES members have commented on this paper yet.

Subscribe to this discussion

To be notified of new comments on this paper you can subscribe to this RSS feed. Forum users should login to see additional options.

Start a discussion!

If you would like to start a discussion about this paper and are an AES member then you can login here:
Username:
Password:

If you are not yet an AES member and have something important to say about this paper then we urge you to join the AES today and make your voice heard. You can join online today by clicking here.