On the Relative Importance of Visual and Spatial Audio Rendering on VR Immersion

A study was performed using a virtual environment to investigate the relative importance of spatial audio fidelity and video resolution on perceived audio-visual quality and immersion. Subjects wore a head-mounted display and headphones and were presented with a virtual environment featuring music and speech stimuli using three levels each of spatial audio quality and video resolution. Spatial audio was rendered monaurally, binaurally with head-tracking, and binaurally with head-tracking and room acoustic rendering. Video was rendered at resolutions of 0.5 megapixels per eye, 1.5 megapixels per eye, and 2.5 megapixels per eye. Results showed that both video resolution and spatial audio rendering had a statistically significant effect on both immersion and audio-visual quality. Most strikingly, the results showed that under the conditions that were tested in the experiment, the addition of room acoustic rendering to head-tracked binaural audio had the same improvement on immersion as increasing the video resolution five-fold, from 0.5 megapixels per eye to 2.5 megapixels per eye.