Final Thesis

Development of a New 3D Listening Comprehension Task in Virtual Reality

Until recently, most acoustical and psychological studies have been carried out in classic laboratory 2D settings. However, with the increasing availability of technology, virtual reality (VR) is more commonly used in research. This raises the question of how established paradigms can be translated into VR and exploit the benefits of the immersive multimodal experience. A previous study on listening comprehension in VR has investigated feasible input methods to gain first insights into the participants’ behavior. Based on this prestudy, the aim of the current thesis is to develop a new, close-to-real-life paradigm in a virtual classroom setting. Therefore, the existing paradigm structure needs to be re-evaluated and the new tasks are implemented in VR using the Unity game engine. The newly proposed paradigm will be validated using a listening experiment.
Requirements: - Programming skills - Independent working - Interest in cognitive psychology Optional Skills: - Knowledge of MATLAB, Unity, C#