title: Binaural sound rendering improves immersion in a daily usage of a smartphone video game
Creators: name: Moreira, Julian
name: Gros, Laetitia
name: Nicol, Rozenn
name: Viaud-Delmon, Isabelle
name: Le Prado, Cecile
name: Natkin, Stephane
Publisher: name: EAA Spatial Audio Signal Processing Symposium
Year: 2019
Subjects: Binaural
Smartphone
Video Game
Quality of experience

description: Binaural rendering is a technology that could be advantageously coupled with a smartphone application, but is still not commonly used. The aim of this study is to investigate how this technology could enrich the experience of a video game application delivered on a smartphone, in terms of immersion, memorization and performance. We have used a longitudinal research procedure, the Experience Sampling Method, asking individuals to accomplish short game sessions in their daily lives. With this procedure, we want to determine if a significant effect of binaural rendering can be detected while data are noised by realistic contextual variations. During five weeks, individuals were notified twice a day by SMS to play a five minutes session (for a total of 70 sessions per individual). Half of the sessions was sounded with monophonic sources, and the other half was sounded with non-individualized binaural sources. The game is an Infinite Runner where the player controls an avatar that walks automatically on a procedurally generated road, and with an increasing speed. The goal is to bring the avatar as far as possible, avoiding obstacles and gathering bonus items. In each session, individuals have first to provide information in a survey about their usage context (location, mobility level, social surroundings and mental load level), second to play the game, and third to answer a survey about their feeling of immersion, or to perform a memorization task. In the immersion survey, individuals are asked 1) to assess their sense of presence in the virtual scene; 2) if yes or no they experienced a 3D-sound effect; 3) to assess how much sound has contributed to their feeling of immersion and 4) to assess how much the external context affected their feeling of immersion. In the memorization task, individuals have 1) to recall in the right order audiovisual objects they have encountered during the game; 2) to assess how much the sound location of the objects helped them in this task and 3) to assess how much the visual location of the objects helped them in this task. The immersion survey and memorization task are interchanged and randomly proposed, in order to limit the effect of anticipation of the task. Performance is measured with the score obtained at the end of each session -a mix between the traveled distance and the number of items collected-. The results indicate that although all types of playing were represented, individuals mainly played at home, alone or with familiar people, sitting or lying down, and with a low to medium mental load. The feeling of immersion was significantly higher during the binaural sessions, even if binaural rendering was not consciously perceived by the participants. Memorization and performance were slightly better during the binaural sessions, but this improvement was not statistically significant. The difficulty of the memorization task is probably at stake in this lack of difference between the two sound conditions. In conclusion, the study consistently suggests perceptually improved immersive audio experience with binaural rendering in spite of the context of use, justifying its implementation in smartphone applications.