Matching auditory and visual room size, distance, and source orientation in virtual reality

Matching visual and auditory cues in virtual reality (VR) is important to provide plausibility and create the impression of presence in a scene. This paper presents an experiment in VR, in which participants match acoustic and visual room size, distance, and orientation of a directive sound source in a simulated concert hall. The simulation is fully interactive and allows the participants to move with 6 degrees of freedom. For all three parameters, the experiment was done in both directions: adjusting the acoustic parameters to given visual settings and adjusting the visual parameters to given acoustic settings. The results show that the adjustment generally works in both directions. However, for distance the auditory adjustment works better and does not reveal the typical compression. Regarding room size, results agree with just noticeable differences in reverberation time known from real-world experiments.