Subjective Evaluation of the Impact of Spatial Audio on Triadic Communication in Virtual Reality

Virtual Reality (VR) enables users to meet, converse, and collaborate in shared virtual environments. For such communication systems, many system factors can affect user experience and perception. To effectively allocate system resources, understanding of the relative influence of such factors is required. One important factor is a spatial auralization, which has been shown to elevate users’ experience in traditional and single-user VR systems. However, its effect in multi-party social VR has not been fully investigated. In this work, we conducted a study assessing the effect of spatial audio on audiovisual plausibility and presence perception in a three-user interactive communication scenario. Triads of participants perform a collaborative conversation task under three conditions: a VR condition with binaural spatial audio, a VR condition with simple diotic audio, and a real-world reference condition. This paper presents the results of the study based on questionnaire-based evaluation.