Impact of Binaural 3D Sound on Navigation Within a Virtual Environment.

This paper describes the execution and analysis of an experiment carried out to assess the impact of providing binaural 3D sound guidance during a search task within a virtual reality environment. The experiment compared guidance by full binaural 3D sound to guidance provided by a sound whose intensity (equal in both ears) decreases as the straight-line distance from the sound source increases. The results of the experiments with 8 human subjects reveal that providing full binaural 3D sound guidance resulted in a statistically significant reduction in the time required to complete the search task. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]