Comparing Room Acoustical Ratings In An Interactive Virtual Environment To Those In The Real Room

To transfer listening experiments from the real world to the laboratory, audio-visual environments can be used. Interactive virtual environments (IVEs), with head-tracked binaural audio playback via headphones and visualisation via a head-mounted display (HMD) are a promising tool for this task. Audio reproduction within an IVE can be evaluated for authenticity, plausibility, and transfer plausibility. However, these paradigms do not indicate whether experiments in an IVE, typically located in a completely different room, yield the same results as real-world experiments. In a previous study, plausibility was evaluated using an IVE in the original room. A high degree of plausibility was observed as long as the directivity of the sources was taken into account in the room simulation. The current study utilizes the same IVE for multi- stimulus rating experiments. Participants had to rate five room acoustic related attributes for head-tracked binaural auralisations based on measured and simulated binaural room impulse responses and a loudspeaker reproduction in the real room. Participants could perceive small differences in reverberation and gave higher ratings to auralizations based on simulated BRIRs compared to the real loudspeaker in the room.