Influence of auditory and visual feedback for perceiving walking over bumps and holes in desktop VR

In this paper, we present an experiment whose goal is to investigate the role of sound and vision in the recognition of different surface profiles in a walking scenario. Fifteen subjects participated to two within-subjects experiments where they were asked to interact with a desktop system simulating bumps, holes and flat surfaces by means of audio, visual and audio-visual cues. Results of the first experiment show that participants are able to successfully identify the surface profiles provided through the proposed audio-visual techniques. Results of a second experiment in which conflictual audiovisual stimuli were presented, reveal that for some of the proposed visual effects the visual feedback is dominant on the auditory one, while for the others the role of dominance is inverted. Copyright © 2010 by the Association for Computing Machinery, Inc.