A Sound Approach: Mitigating Distance Compression in Virtual Reality with Spatially Incongruent Real-World Sounds

Virtual reality (VR) technology offers highly controlled immersive experiences that can be used to conduct spatial cognition research. However, there are VR-specific perceptual biases that reduce its ability to generalize all findings to real-world scenarios. One specific bias causes observers to perceive objects as closer than intended, a phenomenon called distance compression. Although prior research has focused primarily on visual and technological solutions to distance compression, using other senses as a potential remedy (e.g., hearing) for the bias has not been explored. Here, participants completed both a blind-walking task for distance estimation and a cross-modal perceptual-matching task to evaluate audiovisual spatial displacement. The results showed that real-world sounds spatially displaced both in front of and behind a corresponding visual target increased the accuracy of blind walking relative to vision-only cues, albeit with a small effect. Individual differences measures, including performance on the perceptual-matching task and the relative variability of auditory and visual stimuli, did not account for the individual differences in the effectiveness of spatially displaced sounds. Overall, this study demonstrates the potential for adding multisensory information (specifically the addition of non-virtual sounds) to improve the accuracy of distance perception in VR.