Welcome

to be presented at: International Symposium on Auditory and Audiological Research (ISAAR) 2025

Listening effort in real-world environments is shaped by a complex interplay of factors, including time-varying background noise, visual and acoustic cues from both interlocutors and distractors, and the acoustic properties of the surrounding space. However, many studies investigating listening effort neglect both auditory and visual fidelity: static background noise is frequently used to avoid variability, talker visualization often disregards acoustic complexity, and experiments are commonly conducted in free-field environments without spatialized sound or realistic room acoustics. These limitations risk undermining the ecological validity of study outcomes. To address this, we developed an audiovisual virtual reality (VR) framework capable of rendering immersive, realistic scenes that integrate dynamic auditory and visual cues. Background noise included time-varying speech and non-speech sounds (e.g., conversations, appliances, traffic), spatialized in controlled acoustic environments. Participants were immersed in a visually rich VR setting populated with animated virtual agents. Listening effort was assessed using a heard-text-recall paradigm embedded in a dual-task design: participants listened to and remembered short stories told by two embodied conversational agents while simultaneously performing a vibrotactile secondary task. We compared three room acoustic conditions: a free-field environment, a room optimized for reverberation time, and an untreated reverberant room. Preliminary results from 30 participants (15 female; age range: 18–33; M = 25.1, SD = 3.05) indicated that room acoustics significantly affected both listening effort and short-term memory performance, with notable differences between free-field and reverberant conditions. These findings underscore the importance of realistic acoustic environments when investigating listening behavior in immersive audiovisual settings.

2025 International Conferences in Central Europe on Computer Graphics, Visualization and Computer Vision (WSCG 2025)

While mobile devices have developed into hardware with advanced capabilities for rendering 3D gra-phics, they commonly lack the computational power to render large 3D scenes with complex lighting interactively. A prominent approach to tackle this is rendering required views on a remote server and streaming them to the mobile client. However, the rate at which servers can supply data is limited, e.g., by the available network speed, requiring image-based rendering techniques like image warping to compensate for the latency and allow a smooth user experience, especially in scenes where rapid user movement is essential. In this paper, we present a novel streaming approach designed to minimize arti-facts during the warping process by including an additional visibility layer that keeps track of occluded surfaces while allowing access to 360° views. In addition, we propose a novel mesh generation techni-que based on the detection of loops to reliably create a mesh that encodes the depth information requi-red for the image warping process. We demonstrate our approach in a number of complex scenes and compare it against existing works using two layers and one layer alone. The results indicate a significant reduction in computation time while achieving comparable or even better visual results when using our dual-layer approach.

2025 IEEE Conference on Virtual Reality and 3D User Interfaces Abstracts and Workshops (VRW)

Teleportation, a popular navigation technique in virtual environments, is favored for its efficiency and reduction of cybersickness but presents challenges such as reduced spatial awareness and limited navigational freedom compared to continuous techniques. I would like to focus on three aspects that advance our understanding of teleportation in both the spatial and the temporal domain. 1) An assessment of different parametrizations of common mathematical models used to specify the target location of the teleportation and the influence on teleportation distance and accuracy. 2) Extending teleportation capabilities to improve navigational freedom, comprehensibility, and accuracy. 3) Adapt teleportation to the time domain, mediating temporal disorientation. The results will enhance the expressivity of existing teleportation interfaces and provide validated alternatives to their steering-based counterparts.