Binaural bone-conducted sound in virtual environments: Evaluation of a portable, multimodal motion simulator prototype

Virtual and augmented reality applications provide us with increasingly compelling multisensory worlds. Although spatial sound technologies are often used in such applications, headphone based sound reproduction may result in an undesired ‘‘mediation awareness’’ for an enduser. An alternative can be provided by bone-conducted sound technologies, traditionally used in hearing aids applications. Recent studies with bilaterally fitted bone-conduction transducers suggest that binaural sound cues can be rendered using this technology. In this paper we used binaural boneconducted sound reproduction for enhancing a multi-modal self-motion simulator prototype. Similar to previous results from headphone based reproduction, the present study shows that the addition of moving sound images to visual stimuli significantly increase vection and spatial presence responses. These results provide empirical evidence that dynamic auditory scenes can be created using spatial bone-conducted sound with at least 45" horizontal resolution. The present research demonstrates the feasibility of using binaural bone-conducted sound in mediated environments.