Journal of Virtual Reality and Broadcasting, Volume 3 (2006), No. 5 Exploring Urban Environments Using Virtual and Augmented Reality (original) (raw)
Related papers
Auditory Perception of Motor Vehicle Travel Paths
Human Factors: The Journal of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society, 2012
Objective-These experiments address concerns that motor vehicles in electric engine mode are so quiet that they pose a risk to pedestrians, especially those with visual impairments.
Transportation Research Part F: Traffic Psychology and Behaviour, 2016
When driven at low speeds, cars operating in electric mode have been found to be quieter than conventional cars. As a result, the auditory cues which pedestrians and cyclists use to assess the presence, proximity and location oncoming traffic may be reduced, posing a safety hazard. This laboratory study examined auditory localisation of conventional and electric cars including vehicle motion paths relevant for cycling activity. Participants (N = 65) in three age groups (16-18, 30-40 and 65-70 year old) indicated the location and movement direction (approaching versus receding) of cars driven at 15, 30 and 50 km/h in two ambient sound conditions (low and moderate). Results show that low speeds, higher ambient sound level and older age were associated with worse performance on the location and motion direction tasks. In addition, participants were less accurate at determining the location of electric and conventional car sounds emanating from directly behind the participant. Implications for cycling safety and proposals for adding extra artificial noise or warning sounds to quiet (electric) cars are discussed.
A Spatial Auditory Display for the Prevention of Pedestrian-Motor Vehicle Collisions
Pedestrian-motor vehicle collisions account for over 6% of all workplace fatalities and are the leading cause of work related traumatic injury among highway workers. Interventions to reduce these accidents have focused primarily on vision. However, given the high demands on the visual attention of both pedestrian workers and vehicle operators, auditory warning might be a fruitful avenue for the reduction of traumatic injury to pedestrians who interact with motor vehicles. Recent research on the perception of auditory looming has shown that listeners tend to underestimate the amount of time it will take for an approaching sound source to reach them. The perceptual bias effectively signals that the source is closer than actual and thus, gives the listener more time than expected to avoid collision (the margin of safety effect). Here we identified some specific acoustic conditions that maximize the perceptual bias to hear looming sound sources as closer than actual. We made binaural recordings of approaching motor vehicles that produced either tones or broadband noise as they approached. Listeners underestimated vehicle arrival time in all conditions, but exhibited a significantly larger margin of safety for vehicles that produced tones as they approached. The results suggest that making approaching vehicles produce subtle tones by introducing a temporary a pavement treatment in work zones should increase the margin of worker safety.
Influence of speed-related auditory feedback on braking in a 3D-driving simulator
Transportation Research Part F: Traffic Psychology and Behaviour, 2017
Although discrete auditory stimuli have been found useful for emergency braking, the role of continuous speed-related auditory feedback has not been investigated yet. This point may though be of importance in electric vehicles in which acoustic cues are drastically changed. The present study addressed this question through two experiments. In experiment 1, 12 usual drivers were exposed to naturalistic auditory feedback mimicking those issued from electric cars, while facing dynamic visual scenes in a 3D driving simulator. After being passively travelled up to a sustained constant speed, subjects had to stop their car in front of a traffic light that unexpectedly turned to red. Modifications of the speedrelated auditory feedback did not impact braking initiation and regulation. In experiment 2, synthesized auditory feedback based on the Shepard-Risset glissando was provided to a new sample of 15 usual drivers in the same task. Pitch variations of this acoustic stimulus, although not scaled to an absolute speed, were manipulated as a function of visual speed changes. Changing the mapping between pitch variations of the synthesized auditory feedback and visual speed changes induced adjustments on braking which depended on acceleration/deceleration feedback. These findings stressed the importance of the acoustic content and its dynamics for car speed control.
Virtual Reality for Subjective Assessment of Sound Quality in Cars
Journal of The Audio Engineering Society, 2018
Binaural recording and playback has been used for decades in automotive industry for performing subjective assessment of sound quality in cars, avoiding expensive and difficult tests on the road. Despite the success of this technology, several drawbacks are inherent in this approach. The playback on headphones does not benefit of head-tracking, so the localization is poor. The HRTFs embedded in the binaural rendering are those of the dummy head employed for recording the sound inside the car, and finally there is no visual feedback, so the listener gets a mismatch between visual and aural stimulations. The new Virtual Reality approach solves all these problems. The research focuses on obtaining a 360° panoramic video of the interior of vehicle, accompanied by audio processed in High Order Ambisonics format, ready for being rendered on a stereoscopic VR visor. It is also possible to superimpose onto the video a real-time colormap of noise levels, with iso-level curves and calibrated ...
Applied Acoustics, 2021
Virtual reality is becoming an important tool for studying the interaction between pedestrians and road vehicles, by allowing the analysis of potentially hazard situations without placing subjects in real risk. However, most of the current simulators are unable to accurately recreate traffic sounds that are congruent with the visual scene. This has been recognized as a fault in the virtual audiovisual scenarios used in such contexts. This study proposes a method for delivering a binaural auralization of the noise generated by a moving vehicle to an arbitrarily located moving listener (pedestrian). Building on previously developed methods, the proposal presented here integrates in a novel way a dynamic auralization engine, thus enabling real-time update of the acoustic cues in the binaural signal delivered via headphones. Furthermore, the proposed auralization routine uses Close ProXimity (CPX) tyre-road noise signal as sound source input, facilitating the quick interchangeability of source signals, and easing the noise collection procedure. Two validation experiments were carried out, one to quantitatively compare field signals with CPX-derived virtual signal recordings, and another to assess these same signals through psychoacoustic models. The latter aims to assure that the reproduction of the synthesized signal is perceptually similar to one occurring on pedestrian/vehicle interactions during situations of street crossing. Discrepancies were detected, and emphasized when the vehicle is within close distance from the receiver (pedestrian). However, the analysis indicated that these pose no hindrance to the study of vehicle-pedestrian interaction. Improvements to the method are identified and further developments are proposed.
A dynamic binaural synthesis system for investigation into situational awareness for truck drivers
2016
Yearly, a number of accidents happen, where cyclists are injured by right turning trucks. In Denmark, the proposed solution has been to provide a higher number of mirrors to the truck driver in order to cover visual blind spots. However, this doesn't seem to eliminate the problem. Investigations into the reason for this point to cognitive phenomena such as change blindness, where more visual information won't help. For other professional vehicle operators such as pilots, auditory solutions adding to a higher situational awareness has proven valuable. This paper describes the development of a dynamic binaural synthesis system for investigation into situational awareness for truck drivers. The system is built around several software components enabling the 3D positioning of an auditory representation of a bicycle. The sound is played back over headphones to the truck driver whose head movements are monitored and taken into account in the binaural sound synthesis. To enable experiments in real traffic, the system facilitates an operator interface where the investigator can position the auditory objects according to real bicycles appearing in the traffic. The software is organized in a number of modules communicating over a network protocol (UDP) enabling distribution on several hardware devices. The modules are: Graphical user interface, head tracking server, truck tracking, and binaural synthesis module. The function of the individual modules as well as overall topology of the system will be presented, and initial practical experience with the system used in real driving situations will be discussed.
Back-seat driver: Spatial sound for vehicular way-finding and situation awareness
Frontier of Computer …, 2006
We are exploring IDSS (intelligent driver support systems), especially including way-finding presented via spatial audio.(" Way-finding" refers to giving a driver directions, as via car navigation ['car-nabi"] GPS/GIS systems.) We have developed a networked driving simulator as a virtual-reality based interface (control/display system) featuring integration with the Sc haire rotary motion platform for azimuth-display, stereographic display for 3D graphics, and spatial audio (sound spatialization) way-finding cues. A design for a ...
Immersive Virtual Reality and Environmental Noise Assessment: an innovative audio-visual approach
Several international studies have shown that traffic noise has a negative impact on people's health and that people's annoyance does not depend only on noise energetic levels, but rather on multi-perceptual factors. The combination of virtual reality technology and audio rendering techniques allow us to experiment a new approach for environmental noise assessment that can help to investigate in advance the potential negative effects of noise associated with a specific project and that in turn can help designers to make educated decisions. In the present study, the audio–visual impact of a new motorway project on people has been assessed by means of immersive virtual reality technology. In particular, participants were exposed to 3D reconstructions of an actual landscape without the projected motorway (ante operam condition), and of the same landscape with the projected motorway (post operam condition). Furthermore, individuals' reactions to noise were assessed by means of objective cognitive measures (short term verbal memory and executive functions) and subjective evaluations (noise and visual annoyance). Overall, the results showed that the introduction of a projected motorway in the environment can have immediate detrimental effects of people's well-being depending on the distance from the noise source. In particular, noise due to the new infrastructure seems to exert a negative influence on short term verbal memory and to increase both visual and noise annoyance. The theoretical and practical implications of these findings are discussed.