The importance of perceived self‐motion in experiencing convincing virtual acoustic rendering

One factor that makes a virtual acoustic environment more convincing is the capacity to present information that enables a listener to answer questions about the geometry of the acoustical space in which they are immersed. This paper reviews the results of several studies in which virtual sound sources were presented to listeners via a loudspeaker array located in an anechoic chamber, and asked about details such as the location of a missing wall in a simulated rectangular room, and whether or not a reduction in the loudness of a virtual source was due to the interposition of a virtual wall between source and listener. When a listener was unaware of changes in the virtual listening position, such questions were difficult to answer; however, when listeners were informed of their path through the environment via computer graphic animation, performance improved significantly. The results of these perceptual experiments suggest that perceived self‐motion may be an important determinant of how convincing virtu...