Toward Objective Measures Of Auditory Co-Immersion In Virtual And Augmented Reality

"Co-immersion" refers to the perception of real or virtual objects as contained within or belonging to a shared multisensory scene. Environmental features such as lighting and reverberation contribute to the experience of coimmersion even when awareness of those features is not explicit. Objective measures of co-immersion are needed to validate user experience and accessibility in augmented-reality applications, particularly those that aim for "face-toface" quality. Here, we describe an approach that combines psychophysical measurement with virtual-reality games to assess users' sensitivity to room-acoustic differences across concurrent talkers in a simulated complex scene. Eliminating the need for explicit judgments, Odd-one-out tasks allow psychophysical thresholds to be measured and compared directly across devices, algorithms, and user populations.