Perception of Self-motion and Presence in Auditory Virtual Environments

Apart from inducing a high sense of presence, creating a sensation of self-motion is often a key issue of many Virtual Reality applications. However, self-motion perception (vection) has been primarily investigated for visual stimuli. This study explored the possibility of inducing vection by realistic auditory stimuli. Furthermore, influence of various audio design parameters on auditoryinduced vection was studied. The results suggest that sound source characteristic is a primary determinant of auditoryinduced vection, especially for an environment with only a single sound source. However, it was also found that the type of sound source may play less of a role when the environment contains multiple sound sources. Auditoryinduced vection is also depending on whether or not room acoustic cues are included in the simulation. It is however likely that it is the interaction between type of sound source and the environment that is important. Keywords--Self-motion perception, Vection, Auditory cues, Ecological acoustics, Binaural reproduction, Auralization, Presence.