On the Improvement of Localization of 3D Sound by Head Motion and Latency Compensation in Virtual Reality

Jei-Tun Wu Department of Psychology National Taiwan University, Taiwan, R.O.C. Abstract This paper proposes two experiments to examine the effects of human head movement and latency compensation in 3D sound localization. There are two hypotheses, the first hypothesis is that through the computer simulation of 3D sound, dynamic head movement can help in the localization of sound in space, as compared to fixed head position. The second hypothesis is when there is latency introduced in the computer generation of 3D sound, a human subject can perform better in a sound locating task than the one without compensation. The results of two proposed experiments corroborate with the above two hypotheses. Moreover, we are able to identify that with dynamic head movement, the human capability can be enhanced by more than 90% in the localization of sound in space and at the same time reduce the front-back ambiguity. In the second experiment involving a typical latency at 300ms, it is shown that with compensation for latency the average time to perform sound locating task can be reduced by more than 50% than that without compensation. A priori study of the latency effects indicates that if the latency is larger than 150ms, human performance of locating a 3D sound source is noticeably decreased.