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Sound source localization (SSL) capability serves as a crucial indicator of early hearing impairment, with applications in hearing disorder diagnosis, hearing aid fitting, and neurodegenerative disease screening. However, traditional SSL testing requires expensive professional equipment (over 500, 000) and dedicated soundproof facilities (over 30 m 2), significantly limiting accessibility for large-scale screening programs. While VR-based systems offer a promising alternative, they face fundamental challenges when extending to full 360° scenarios, particularly severe confusion between front and rear sound sources and interaction fatigue for rear target selection. To address these limitations, we propose the VR360-SSL system, the first 360° VR-based screening and rehabilitation tracking tool. Our approach introduces a frequency domain enhancement strategy for non-individualized head-related transfer functions that perceptually compensates for front-back ambiguity by reinforcing high-frequency cues for front sources and enhancing low-frequency components for rear sources. We further incorporate adaptive interaction modalities (eye gaze and hand gesture) with pre-experiment assessment that matches interaction modes to users' VR experience and spatial imagination abilities. Preliminary experiments with 32 participants (including 23 normal hearing (NH) individuals and 9 single-sided deafness (SSD) patients) indicate that the system provides localization trends consistent with real sound field environments and successfully identifies performance gradients across different hearing impairment severities. Front-back confusion rates were significantly reduced to levels comparable with real-world medical setups. By reducing costs to a single VR headset, our system enables SSL testing expansion from specialized clinics to primary care and community-based screening scenarios, particularly suitable for VR-naive elderly populations and resource-limited areas.
Yin et al. (Mon,) studied this question.