Sound and colour: evaluating auditory-visual tests in virtual reality and traditional desktop settings
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Published Version
Date
2024-06-03
Authors
O'Toole, Patrick
Mancini, Maurizio
Pitt, Ian
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
Published Version
Abstract
In this pilot study, we used a balanced A/B testing method to evaluate how an environment—a Virtual Reality (VR) head-mounted display (HMD) versus a traditional desktop—affects the performance of 20 participants on a musical pitch-colour association test. We aimed to discern the influence of testing environments on musical pitch-colour associations. Our findings revealed no significant difference in performance between the VR HMD and the traditional desktop conditions. Previous studies highlight VR’s potential, but the results of our investigation—focusing on limited immersive and presence qualities—suggest that working in VR as opposed to a standard desktop environment has no significant influence on musical pitch-colour association test results. This outcome prompts a further investigation into other inherent VR characteristics, such as spatial audio, natural environment simulations, and interactive object manipulation, which could potentially enhance the effectiveness of auditory-visual association tests. This study is the first in a series of studies to explore how VR technologies can be exploited to augment multi-modal testing, with a fully immersive musical pitch-colour association test envisioned.
Description
Keywords
Virtual reality , Audio , Visuals , Colour , Synaesthesia , Cross-modal associations
Citation
O’Toole, P., Mancini, M. and Pitt, I. (2024) 'Sound and colour: evaluating auditory-visual tests in virtual reality and traditional desktop settings', Proceedings of the 2024 International Conference on Advanced Visual Interfaces. Arenzano, Genoa Italy, 3 - 7 June, pp. 1–5. https://doi.org/10.1145/3656650.3656665