Final Thesis

Examining the influence of virtual agents on auditory selective attention in an audiovisual classroom scenario

Master Thesis of Ye, Wenlin

The ability to focus our attention on a specific sound source in complex everyday situations is a very fascinating skill, which is widely described as auditory selective attention (ASA). A new approach wants to investigate ASA in a realistic virtual reality (VR) environment. The next step towards a close-to-real-life scenario will be the integration of virtual agents to mimic virtual peers in a more realistic classroom scenario. When creating these agents, their visual appearance and animation-related factors such as gaze behavior and lip synchronization need to be investigated. Further, the established ASA paradigm needs to be re-evaluated to suit this new addition. The remaining validity of the ASA paradigm as well as the plausibility of the new VR setting will be evaluated using a listening experiment.

Requirements
- Programming skills
- Independent working
- Interest in the topic

Optional Skills
- Knowledge of MATLAB, Unity, C#