Soundsource 210/24/2022 The shape of the ear, head and body modify sound as it reaches the ear, resulting in interaural level differences, interaural time differences and spectral changes which are used for the localization of sound sources (for an overview see Blauert (1997) or Hartmann (1999)). This is where potential problems can arise, as recent studies have shown that HMDs affect the acoustic signals ( Genovese et al., 2018 Gupta et al., 2018 Ahrens et al., 2019). Although for many studies, headphones might suffice as the playback method for this acoustic environment, there are also many cases where loudspeaker playback might be preferred to preserve the participants own head-related transfer function or to be able to wear hearing aids or other ear-worn devices. With the recent increase in quality and availability, head mounted virtual reality displays (HMDs) are now regularly used in combination with virtual sound environments to create more realistic and immersive audio-visual experiments (e.g., Echevarria Sanchez et al., 2017 Kessling and Görne, 2018 Suárez et al., 2019). As such, most use cases for VR will be unaffected by these shifts in the perceived location of the auditory stimuli. Thus, the presence of VR glasses can alter acoustic localization when using Ambisonics sound reproduction, but visual information can compensate for most of the effects. While the localization performance itself was affected by the Ambisonics order, there was no interaction between the Ambisonics order and the effect of the HMD. Presenting visual information about the environment and potential sound sources did reduce this HMD-induced shift, however it could not fully compensate for it. The physical presence of the VR glasses without visual information increased the perceived lateralization of the auditory stimuli by on average about 2°, especially in the right hemisphere. Results showed that with 1st-order Ambisonics the localization error is larger than with the higher orders, while the differences across the higher orders were small. Here, we investigated how VR glasses affect the localization of virtual sound sources on the horizontal plane produced using either 1st-, 3rd-, 5th- or 11th-order Ambisonics with and without visual information. However, the combination of both technologies, Ambisonics and VR glasses, might affect the spatial cues for auditory localization and thus, the localization percept. Both technologies have been shown to be suitable for research. To reproduce realistic audio-visual scenarios in the laboratory, Ambisonics is often used to reproduce a sound field over loudspeakers and virtual reality (VR) glasses are used to present visual information.
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