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Description
Audiovisual immersive rooms represent emerging virtualization spaces that address the individual isolation inherent to head-tracked binaural Virtual Reality (VR). However, auralizing highly reverberant environments remains a challenge, as reverberant energy degrades acoustic cues essential for human spatial localization. This study evaluates sound source localization in reverberant fields within a 16.2.10 audiovisual immersive room, comparing results to traditional head-tracked binaural VR. A 4-Alternative Forced Choice (4-AFC) horizontal localization task was conducted with 26 participants. Stimuli were auralized using pink noise bursts and Third-Order Ambisonics impulse responses generated in ODEON for the same reverberation room, with absorption progressively increased to produce reverberation conditions ranging from highly reverberant to nearly anechoic. As expected, the results demonstrate that localization accuracy decreased with increasing reverberation. However, across all conditions, the immersive room achieved higher accuracy and lower task response latency, exhibiting fewer localization confusions and lateral mislocalizations than binaural VR.