Audiovisual models for virtual reality: Underground station (vor Ort)
* Presenting author
Abstract:
Virtual reality offers new avenues to study acoustic communication by recreating or altering the audiovisual representation of the environment. Underground stations are among the places with challenging communication conditions, which we aim to study in the controlled laboratory environment. We implemented two acoustic scenes taking place in a simulation of the underground station Theresienstraße (Munich) in the real-time Simulated Open Filed Environment (rtSOFE). In the first scene, the talkers are horizontally distributed around the listener at every 30°, representing common test situations in audiological research. In the second scene, the talkers are radially spanning in distance from 1 m to 10.1 m in front of the listener, like an approaching person, to simulate the effects of reverberation with increasing distance. The scenes were evaluated against the in-situ acoustic measurements of the binaural and omnidirectional impulse responses in terms of the binaural and energetic parameters, and several additional acoustic measurements were performed to characterize the environment, the equipment, and the background sounds. The whole collection of the virtual reality assets is freely available for research in other labs and documented thoroughly.
