Quality of Auditory-Tactile Virtual Environments

In our daily life, we mostly perceive an event by more than one sensory modality (e.g., vision, audition, touch). Therefore multimodal integration and interaction play an important role when we use objects in our environment, e.g. for object or event recognition. Burdea and Coiffet define the virtual environment as a simulation in which computer graphics is used to create a realistic looking interactive world [1]. Virtual environments support communication with the user not only through the visual channel but also through other modalities, taking into account the multisensory nature of humans. In addition to the visual communication channel, the auditory and tactile senses are the most used communication channels. In recent years a variety of customer products which have additional tactile input and output capabilities have been developed (for example: Apple iPhone, different touch-screen applications, Wiimote, etc.). Some of these devices bring new possibilities to interact with a computer. These trends are also valid for the auditory modality. Binaural synthesis and rendering are becoming a key technology for multimedia products. “Virtual Environments” are not any more only the subject of academic research, there are also commercial applications, particularly in medicine, game and entertainment industry. This trend results that the quality of virtual environments becomes more and more important. The user interactivity of virtual environments is a key issue for the quality perception. Several studies have discussed the quality of displays, input and output devices (for different modalities) as well as software and hardware issues. However the multimodal user interaction should be taken into account in addition to the mentioned parameters to assess the quality of virtual environments. The focus of this paper is on the parameters influencing the perceptual quality of audio-tactile virtual environments.