Sound is often an integral part of interactive animated scenarios, such as VR applications, games and realistic simulations. Up to now, research has focussed on how visual stimuli can affect the user's perceived quality of the rendered graphics. Although there is a plethora of evidence coming from the psychology field about crossmodal interactions between visual and auditory stimuli, graphics researchers have not yet considered exploiting sound in order to affect the perceived quality of the 3D visual environment. Furthermore, although it is well known that sound is attention grabbing, researchers until now have not considered using sound to direct gaze to specific objects/areas in the visual environment, in order to allow for the selective rendering of the scene: only the sound emitting objects at high quality, while the reduced quality of the rest of the 3D scene goes unnoticed by the observers. This gap we are trying to fill with our research in the influence of auditory stimuli on the perceived visual quality (rendering quality and frame rate) of computer generated animated imagery. To gain a better understanding of the crossmodal interactions between the auditory and visual sensory modalities and identify whether such interactions could lead to a new generation of perceptually-adaptive graphics techniques, that would take into account not only the visual stimuli but also the auditory background of a 3D scene, 292 subjects participated in five experiments. Temporal and visual display quality perceptions were investigated by manipulating the frame rate and the rendering quality (number of rays shot per pixel of the image), separately, and by considering different auditory backgrounds. Our experimental studies verified that we can affect the viewer's perception of delivered frame rate with the use of audio. Further results show that the viewers do fixate to sources of sound effects in a scene- even when engaged in a demanding visual task- allowing us to render the corresponding pixels to high quality and significantly drop the quality for the rest of the scene, without any noticeable difference to the observer. In both cases, we save processing resources and/or significant computational time.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:440013 |
| Date | January 2007 |
| Creators | Mastoropoulou, Georgia |
| Publisher | University of Bristol |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Source | http://hdl.handle.net/1983/e46acff9-3150-4f20-a148-86d5ee9be852 |
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