Travelling without moving: Auditory scene cues for translational self-motion

Abstract

Creating a sense of illusory self-motion is crucial for many Virtual Reality applications and the auditory modality is an essential, but often neglected, component for such stimulations. In this paper, perceptual optimization of auditory-induced, translational self-motion (vection) simulation is studied using binaurally synthesized and reproduced sound fields. The results suggest that auditory scene consistency and ecologically validity makes a minimum set of acoustic cues sufficient for eliciting auditory-induced vection. Specifically, it was found that a focused attention task and sound objects motion characteristics (approaching or receding) play an important role in self-motion perception. In addition, stronger sensations for auditory induced self-translation than for previously investigated self-rotation also suggest a strong ecological validity bias, as translation is the most common movement direction.