Audiovisual perception in a virtual world: an application of human-computer interaction evaluation to the development of immersive environments

Abstract

Understanding the mechanisms underlying audiovisual perception is crucial for the development of interactive audiovisual immersive environments. Some human perceptual mechanisms pose challenging problems that can now be better explored with the latest technology in computer-generated environments. Our main goal is to develop an interactive audiovisual immersive system that provides to its users a highly immersive and perceptually coherent interactive environment. In order to do this, we will perform user studies to get a better knowledge of the rules guiding audiovisual perception. This will allow improvements in the simulation of realistic virtual environments through the use of predictive human cognition models as guides for the development of an audiovisual interactive immersive system. This system will encompass the integration of two Virtual Reality systems: a Cave Automatic Virtual Environment-like (CAVE-like) system and a room acoustic modeling and auralization system. The interactivity between user and the audiovisual virtual world will be enabled by the using of a Motion Capture system as a user position tracker.