Feasibility study of virtual reality in audiovisual environment: Assessment of university cafeteria acoustic environment

• Published in: Computer animation and virtual worlds Vol. 35; no. 2
• Main Authors: Zehua, Wen, Xiaoyang, Guo
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Hoboken, USA John Wiley & Sons, Inc 01.03.2024; Wiley Subscription Services, Inc
• Subjects: audiovisual environment; Authenticity; cafeteria; Feasibility studies; noise; questionnaire survey; subjective annoyance rating; Virtual reality
• ISSN: 1546-4261; 1546-427X
• DOI: 10.1002/cav.2231

This study primarily focuses on investigating whether virtual reality scenarios can authentically replicate real‐life audio‐visual environments. The authenticity of audio‐visual environments plays a crucial role in both the design and VR fields today. Only when the authenticity of audio‐visual interactive experiences is validated as feasible can virtual reality technology demonstrate positive impacts. We assessed the annoyance levels subjectively under different audio‐visual conditions: a real cafeteria environment and a simulated cafeteria environment. Participants were tasked with the same activities in both environments. After each experiment, they indicated their levels of annoyance by completing a questionnaire. The results indicated a significant positive correlation between the overall subjective annoyance levels in both experiments and the subjective annoyance levels associated with different behaviors. This suggests that under identical audio conditions, virtual reality scenarios more effectively replicate the real noise environment. Furthermore, we have uncovered that certain objective factors influence the expression of authenticity. Optimizing these factors may potentially further enhance the feasibility of virtual reality technology in audio‐visual environments. In this paper, we developed an evaluation model for audio‐visual interactions in a university cafeteria to construct a mathematical model of human subjective subjective annoyance levels. The results show that there is a significant positive correlation between the overall subjective annoyance level of people and the subjective annoyance level associated with different behaviors in the real cafeteria environment and the virtual cafeteria environment, respectively. Meanwhile, we found that the realism of the audiovisual environment will be enhanced when three factors, including “the realism of the model” “the quality of the sound source” and “the degree of integration between the scene and the sound source”, were optimized.