Towards the use of a serious game to learn to identify the location of a 3D sound in the virtual environment

Abstract

Since the childhood, one learned to detect, more or less precisely, where a sound is coming from in space. In multiple situations, auditory feedbacks can be used to supplement or to reinforce the visual channel, as the auditory channel helps at monitoring the surrounding beyond the limited field of view: over 360°. In past studies, we have observed that the ability to properly assess the direction of a 3D sound varies greatly from one person to another. In particular, we found that training plays a major role in this task. To allow people to improve their abilities in perceiving the direction of a 3D virtual sound, we described here a serious that targets this learning. The designed game has been implemented in Unreal engine 4. An experiment aimed at assessing the value of that serious game is also presented. We observed that all participants of that study have, for the two level of the game, improved their score after practicing the game for a 10 min period.