A Pilot Study of an Acoustic Calibration and Psychoacoustic Validation of a Binaural-Rendered Neuroengineering Laboratory

The increasing research in extended reality technologies has driven significant progress in developing virtual auditory experiments. These efforts aim to create immersive virtual environments, yet challenges such as room divergence—mismatches between virtual and physical auditory spaces—remain critical. This study focused on calibrating a binaural-rendered listening room to match the acoustic parameters of a physical neuroengineering laboratory. Acoustic calibration of a binaural renderer plugin demonstrated reduced imprecision values across parameters, confirming the feasibility of software adjustments to replicate the behavior of physical spaces in extended reality environments. Subjective evaluations by 13 expert listeners revealed a trade-off between timbral and spatial quality, with one condition showing the least degradation in spatial quality and having the worst timbral quality score. The findings emphasize the importance of calibration, validation, and further research to enhance the performance of binaural renderers. This work provides a foundation for using auditory extended reality tools in multidisciplinary research, particularly neuroacoustics, enabling real-time collection of electrophysiological data in controlled, virtual environments.