Speaker
Description
In real environments, direct sound from a source is typically followed by a strong floor reflection whose level and time delay depend on the location of the source and the listener, and may potentially provide additional localisation cues. However, prior findings on reflection effects are mixed, and evidence for virtual reality (VR) applications and environments remain limited. This question is especially relevant for blind and visually impaired (BVI) users, who may rely heavily on accurate auditory spatial cues in audio-only VR for tasks such as orientation and locomotion involving footsteps, cane-impact and echolocation. We developed a dynamic VR sound localisation platform with spatialised rendering of direct sound and options for reflections. This paper reports baseline results from initial experiments using direct sound only. Across stimuli, responses showed significant compression toward the horizontal plane (systematic elevation bias) for controller responses and head pointing. Elevation was a strong predictor of signed localisation error, and sound stimulus significantly modulated the elevation bias slope. In contrast, no robust effect of HRTF was observed on the elevation-bias function, and no sound and HRTF interaction was found. These baseline results provide a reference for subsequent experiments testing whether adding floor reflections reduces elevation-bias compression in VR. We hypothesise that, relative to this baseline, adding floor reflections will reduce elevation-bias compression.