虛擬環境現在用於各種應用,從專業培訓到室內設計。在許多情況下,例如醫學訓練和基於空間性規則的活動(例如團隊運動),獲得的空間知識準確性是一個重要的部分。虛擬環境中出現空間認知的問題是它提供給人類視覺資訊的不足,導致人對環境空間特徵無法有精確判斷。這甚至存在於虛擬實境中,其中距離估計的準確性仍然表現的比實體世界低。在我們調查其他感官對空間認知的支持之後,聽覺刺激似乎是大多數科技最易於整合的選擇,因為它提供距離和方向的信息。我們分別進行了兩個實驗來確認指向性聲音對空間知識獲得之影響,接下來再用針對性的空間音頻線索和聲波化中表現出來,增強人在雙人合作情境下對任務相關信息的接收。實驗結果告知未來的設計該如何整合指向性聲音去支持空間性的虛擬活動,也可以針對每一種情境裡最傾向的感官來增強活動裡的感受。
Virtual environments are now used in a diverse array of applications, from professional training to interior design. In many cases, such as medical training and rule-based spatial activity (e.g. team sports), accuracy of acquired spatial knowledge is an important component of the activity. An issue that arises for spatial cognition in virtual environments is the inadequacy of visual affordances for humans to form precise judgments about spatial features in the environment. This exists even in virtual reality, where distance estimation still demonstrates declined accuracy compared to in the physical world. After surveying the disposition of other sensory modalities to spatial cognition, auditory stimuli appeared to be the most holistic and easily integrable option for most technologies, due to its provision of distance and orientational information. We performed a set of two lab experiments to confirm, respectively, the impact of spatial auditory cues on spatial knowledge acquisition, and then in a collaborative context to explore the effect of interlocutor-controlled spatial auditory cues on addressee understanding of communicated information. The findings show that targeted spatial audio cues and sonification do enhance reception of task-relevant information, and inform how future design of technology-mediated spatial activity may target perceptual enhancement to accommodate an activity’s sensory predisposition.