Final Thesis

Development of a paradigm to examine listening comprehension in virtual reality

Until recently, most acoustical and psychological studies have been carried out in classic laboratory 2D settings. As the technology becomes more stable and affordable, more and more researchers investigate virtual reality. This is also the aim of this study: transferring an established paradigm on listening comprehension towards virtual reality. The key interest in the experiment is investigating the cognitive performance of children in different acoustic settings using a listening comprehension task. However, this new, multimodal approach brings many uncertainties regarding audiovisual interaction. Therefore, a first step is introducing a visual representation by testing the existing paradigm, which uses pen and paper for acquiring responses, while the participant is seated in a virtual classroom using a head mounted display and the Unity game engine. Therefore, the existing paradigm structure needs to be translated and implemented in the virtual environment.