Minimally disruptive auditory cues: their impact on visual performance in virtual reality

Abstract Virtual reality (VR) has the potential to become a revolutionary technology with a significant impact on our daily lives. The immersive experience provided by VR equipment, where the user’s body and senses are used to interact with the surrounding content, accompanied by the feeling of presence elicits a realistic behavioral response. In this work, we leverage the full control of audiovisual cues provided by VR to study an audiovisual suppression effect (ASE) where auditory stimuli degrade visual performance. In particular, we explore if barely audible sounds (in the range of the limits of hearing frequencies) generated following a specific spatiotemporal setup can still trigger the ASE while participants are experiencing high cognitive loads. A first study is carried out to find out how sound volume and frequency can impact this suppression effect, while the second study includes higher cognitive load scenarios closer to real applications. Our results show that the ASE is robust to variations in frequency, volume and cognitive load, achieving a reduction of visual perception with the proposed hardly audible sounds. Using such auditory cues means that this effect could be used in real applications, from entertaining to VR techniques like redirected walking.