Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits IISRealistic virtual environments help to optimize experiments in many scientific fields
Over the past few years, substantial progress has been made in the understanding of auditory cognitive processes and capabilities. Simple virtual environments were used in the experiments that yielded this progress. What these simple environments offer in good control, they tend to lack in realism. Many limitations of earlier laboratory environments can be overcome by interactive virtual environments (IVEs). But how can we evaluate the quality of IVEs, and which benchmark values are relevant for this purpose?
This question is now being investigated by the “Quality of Experience Evaluation of Interactive Virtual Environments with Audiovisual Scenes” (QoEVAVE) project, which is funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG). The project is based on insights from Quality of Experience (QoE) research and includes elements from the VR domain to develop the first comprehensive QoE framework for IVEs. It seeks to obtain an integrated view of the perception of IVE quality as a cognitive process and of the cognitive load for certain tasks as an indicator of the quality of an IVE.
Prof. Emanuël Habets, Head of Department at Fraunhofer IIS and Professor at the International Audio Laboratories (AudioLabs) Erlangen, and Prof. Alexander Raake from TU Ilmenau are heading up the research in the QoEVAVE project. Working together in a multi-stage process, their teams are devising and testing a method for evaluating the quality of IVEs.