A case study of auditory navigation in virtual acoustic environments

ABSTRACT We report results of an auditory navigation experiment. In auditory navigation sound is employed as a navigational aid in a virtual environment. In our experiment, the test task was to find a sound source in a dynamic virtual acoustic environment. In dynamic auralization the movements of the subject are taken into account in acoustic modeling of the room. We tested the effect of three different factors (stimulus, panning method and acoustic environment) to the number of errors and to the time spent in the test in finding the target. The results, which were also statistically validated, proved that noise is the best stimulus, reverberation complicates the navigation and simple models of spatial hearing give enough cues for auditory navigation.