Speaker
Description
Interactive soundscape tools for urban design remain underdeveloped, both in adoption and in their fundamental form. City Ditty, an interactive soundscape simulator, enables city makers to engage with soundscape in virtual reality. Developed through a user-centered design process, it provides core functionalities supporting accessible learning and rapid prototyping of soundscapes by non-sound experts. But how does immersion affect user experience? This study examines how immersion and interaction shapes user experience and soundscape engagement using City Ditty. It uses identical functionality with different modalities of immersion and interaction: a desktop version of City Ditty (controlled with a keyboard and mouse on a 24-inch monitor) and immersive VR version (using a head-mounted device (Varjo XR-3) and controllers (HTC Vive). The same binaural audio rendering, tracking the head position and orientation, was presented across conditions over headphones (AKG K702).33 participants completed a within-subjects evaluation with counterbalanced ordering. Each participant completed 13 structured tasks per modality, introducing controls, exploring and listening to the space, finding, adding, and manipulating different sound sources, and redesigning a space within two comparable virtual park environments. Distinct but functionally equivalent task sets per condition reduced repetition while preserving comparability. Post-evaluation questionnaires captured user preferences and engagement, with exit interviews providing qualitative description of their experience.Preliminary results indicate a strong preference for immersive VR over desktop in terms of visual, auditory, and overall enjoyment, despite identical binaural audio across conditions. This suggests that immersion and interaction shape not only the overall experience but also specifically the listening experience.