Research Information System
Inter-Noise / International Congress and Exposition on Noise Control Engineering 2023, Chiba, Japan, 20 - 23 August 2023, pp.6640-6651, (Full Text)
Virtual environments have been developing and changing the understanding of a space by means
design, perception and usage. This study aims to contribute to the literature on the improvement of
the auditory perception and cognition of virtual spaces used for education, training, and gaming
purposes. This study proposes to offer a realistic representation of soundscapes in virtual
environments according to spatial qualities instead of misleading synthetic sounds by integrating
acoustical simulations with the immersive environment and questioning the experience of a regular
user. The study explores the effects of acoustically simulated and immersive virtual soundscape
design methods on auditory perception through changing forms and materials by series of cognitive
experiments. The results revealed that the participants achieve more accurate results of source-localization, self-localization, and distance guessing in an immersive environment than in the
simulated environment. Also, they were more aware of the soundwalk route, spent more time on tasks,
and evaluated the experience more positively in an immersive environment compared to simulations.
Despite the placement of the auralizations from the simulations as sound sources in immersive
environments, there is still a lack of auditory representation of spatial qualities compared to the
accurate calculation of acoustical parameters in a simulated environment.