Audio-Visual Spatial Aligment Requirements of Central and Peripheral Object Events
This addresses spatial integration challenges in immersive audio-visual systems for VR/AR applications, but is incremental as it builds on existing findings.
The study investigated how spatial alignment affects perceived coherence of audiovisual object events in central vs. peripheral vision, finding a wider capture region in the periphery with an outward bias toward more lateral sounds, while centered stimuli aligned with prior simpler scene results.
Immersive audio-visual perception relies on the spatial integration of both auditory and visual information which are heterogeneous sensing modalities with different fields of reception and spatial resolution. This study investigates the perceived coherence of audiovisual object events presented either centrally or peripherally with horizontally aligned/misaligned sound. Various object events were selected to represent three acoustic feature classes. Subjective test results in a simulated virtual environment from 18 participants indicate a wider capture region in the periphery, with an outward bias favoring more lateral sounds. Centered stimulus results support previous findings for simpler scenes.