The Effect of Discretised and Fully Converged Spatialised Sound on Directional Attention and Distraction

Abstract

A major challenge in Virtual Reality (VR) is to be able to provide interactive rates of realism. However this is very computationally demanding and only recently has high-fidelity rendering become close to interactive rates through a series of novel exploitations of visual perception; to render parts of the scene that are not currently being attended by the viewer at a much lower quality without the difference being perceived. This paper investigates the effect spatialised directional sounds, both discrete and converged have on the visual attention of the user with and without an auditory cue present in the scene. We verify the worth of investigating subliminal saccade shifts from directional audio impulses via a pilot study to eye track participant's free viewing a scene with an audio impulse and an acoustic identifier and also with an audio impulse and no acoustic identifier versus a control. By selecting look zones, we can identify how long users are spending attending a particular area of a scene in these scenarios. This work also investigates whether the effect prevailed, and if so to what extent, with discretised spatialised sound as opposed to a fully converged audio sample. We also present a novel technique for generating interactive discrete acoustic samples from arbitrary geometry. We show that even without an acoustic identifier in the scene, directional sound provides enough of an impulse to guide subliminal saccade shifts and affect perception in such a way that this can be used to guide selective rendering of the scenes.