Manipulation of the Perceived Direction of Wind by Cross-modal Effects of Wind and Three-dimensional Sound

Wind display is a device which presents the sensation of wind for the purpose of improving the presence in virtual reality. Most of the existing wind displays express various wind sensations by blowing air from multiple wind sources. However, existing wind displays require lots of wind sources to reproduce different wind directions. The main contribution of this study involves the proposition of a method to manipulate the perception of wind direction using the cross-modal effect in order to construct a wind display with fewer wind sources. We present three-dimensional (3D) wind sounds along with the wind, and found that the perceived wind direction was altered toward the presented direction by the sound instead of the actual wind direction. The perceived wind direction changed by a maximum of 67.12° toward the direction of the sound. These findings may be because the perceived wind direction is rewritten by the cross-modal presentation of the wind and the realistic 3D wind sound. Our results show that wind perception can be manipulated by multisensory stimuli.