THE SENSE OF PRESENCE WITHIN AUDITORY VIRTUAL ENVIRONMENTS

Two studies were performed to investigate the sense of presence within stereoscopic virtual environments as a function of the addition or ab sence of auditory cues. The first study examined the presence or absen ce of spatialized sound, while the second study compared the use of no nspatialized sound to spatialized sound. Sixteen subjects were allowed to navigate freely throughout several virtual environments and for ea ch virtual environment, their level of presence, the virtual world rea lism, and interactivity between the participant and virtual environmen t were evaluated using survey questions. The results indicated that th e addition of spatialized sound significantly increased the sense of p resence but not the realism of the virtual environment. Despite this o utcome, the addition of a spatialized sound source significantly incre ased the realism with which the subjects interacted with the sound sou rce, and significantly increased the sense that sounds emanated from s pecific locations within the virtual environment. The results suggest that, in the context of a navigation task, while presence in virtual e nvironments can be improved by the addition of auditory cues, the perc eived realism of a virtual environment may be influenced more by chang es in the visual rather than auditory display media. implications of t hese results for presence within auditory virtual environments are dis cussed.