Speaker
Description
Augmented reality (AR) telepresence systems often aim to enhance immersion by adding room-adapted reverberation to remote speech, potentially at the cost of reduced intelligibility and increased listening effort. In this study, we investigated speech recognition and subjective listening effort in a speech-in-noise task across real and virtual acoustic environments with varying degrees of reverberation. Twenty participants performed a sentence recognition task in babble noise under seven conditions, including dry, reverberant, and highly reverberant scenarios, as well as mixed conditions in which the virtualized target remained dry rather than being matched to the acoustic environment in which the noise was placed. Results confirmed that increased reverberation reduces word recognition and increases listening effort. Notable discrepancies were observed between real and virtual presentation, particularly in dry conditions. Importantly, omitting room-adapted reverberation for the virtualized target speech provided only limited benefits for intelligibility and effort. These findings highlight trade-offs in AR audio design and suggest that the acoustics in which the background noise is placed may be more critical than that applied to the target speech in determining listening effort.