Increasing the motion of users in photo-realistic virtual environments by utilising auditory rendering of the environment and ego-motion

An occurring problem of the image-based-rendering technology for Virtual Environments has been that subjects in general showed very little movement of head and body. Our hypothesis is that the movement rate could be enhanced by introducing the auditory modality. In the study described in this paper, 126 subjects participated in a between-subjects experiment involving six different experimental conditions, including both uni-and bi-modal stimuli (auditory and visual). The aim of the study was to investigate the influence of auditory rendering in stimulating and enhancing subjects ’ motion in virtual reality. The auditory stimuli consisted of several combinations of auditory feedback, including static sound sources as well as self-induced sounds. Results show that motion in virtual reality is significantly enhanced when moving sound sources and sound of ego-motion are rendered in the environment. 1