Search

Understanding the influence of technical system parameters on audiovisual experiences is important for technologists to optimize experiences. The focus in this study was on the influence of changes in audio spatialization (varying the loudspeaker configuration for audio rendering from 2.1 to 5.1 to 7.1.4) on the experience of immersion. First, a magnitude estimation experiment was performed to perceptually evaluate envelopment for verifying the initial condition that there is a perceptual difference between the audio spatialization levels. It was found that envelopment increased from 2.1 to 5.1 reproduction, but there was no significant benefit of extending from 5.1 to 7.1.4. An absolute-rating experimental paradigm was used to assess immersion in four audiovisual experiences by 24 participants. Evident differences between immersion scores could not be established, signaling that a change in audio spatialization and subsequent change in envelopment does not guarantee a psychologically immersive experience.

Spatial audio systems are capable of rendering moving sound sources. This is becoming more common in commercial and domestic environments, driven by interest in spatial audio and virtual reality, and underpinned by object-based audio delivery formats. When consulting standard methods for sound quality evaluation in terms of spatially dynamic sound scenes (SDSS), challenges emerge indicating the methods are inadequate for the application. This article presents an overview of state-of-the-art sound quality evaluation methods, particularly focusing on their appropriateness for evaluation of SDSS. Limitations of current methodologies are discussed, and research of temporal evaluation methodologies used in other sensory sciences are reviewed for their potential applicability to audio quality assessment.

Understanding the concept of immersion and its influencing factors is critical for enabling engaging audiovisual experiences. However, a lack of definitional consensus and suitable methods for assessing immersion hinder research on the subject. This chapter discusses the idea of immersion based on a non-exhaustive literature review of the topic and presents an adaptable definition of immersion that is not limited to virtual reality applications. Additionally, an exploratory experimental paradigm for measuring immersion in audiovisual experiences is described. The description of immersion and the experimental framework presented in this chapter are a starting point for resolving the difference in opinion and developing novel methods to thoroughly explore the concept of immersion respectively.

Studying immersion in audiovisual experiences can help technologists deliver engaging and enhanced experiences. As a first step toward this goal this paper details an investigation conducted to establish an experimental paradigm for quantifying immersion and determining the influence of immersive tendency (susceptibility to become immersed) on immersion. A balanced incomplete block design was employed where 21 assessors rated 15 commercially available stimuli (representative of the highest quality encountered in domestic AV applications)without repetitions and simultaneous comparisons. The assessors were instructed to rate immersion on a graphic line scale and document their familiarity with the content. A questionnaire was administered to measure the immersive tendency after the rating experiment. The results show that the assessors can comprehend the description of immersion and follow theexperimental protocol. It is found that immersion is a graded experience and the correlation between immersive tendencies and immersion ratings is predominantly statistically insignificant. The experimental paradigm presented in this paper can form the framework for assessing immersion and developing novel methods to thoroughly explore the concept of immersion in audiovisual experiences.

Quantitative Descriptive Analysis (QDA) was compared with novel sensory methodology on five high-end loudspeakers using five tracks. The focus of the study was on the ability of different sensory methods to predict quality assessments (liking) made by consumers. Preference mapping indicates that projective mapping (PM) and Check-All-That-Apply (CATA) when performed with experts can provide results comparable to QDA, although slightly less accurate. PM done by consumers is less comparable to QDA. Combinations of the sensory tests were also attempted without any clear improvement of results. Practical applications: The results indicate that it may be possible to replace QDA with more rapid sensory methodology for assessing sensory quality of audio products. This may speed up and simplify product development process. However, further studies will be needed to consolidate the results.

With the coming of age of virtual/augmented reality and interactive media, numerous definitions, frameworks, and models of immersion have emerged across different fields ranging from computer graphics to literary works. Immersion is oftentimes used interchangeably with presence as both concepts are closely related. However, there are noticeable interdisciplinary differences regarding definitions, scope, and constituents that are required to be addressed so that a coherent understanding of the concepts can be achieved. Such consensus is vital for paving the directionality of the future of immersive media experiences (IMEx) and all related matters. The aim of this white paper is to provide a survey of definitions of immersion and presence which leads to a definition of immersive media experience (IMEx). The Quality of Experience (QoE) for immersive media is described by establishing a relationship between the concepts of QoE and IMEx followed by application areas of immersive media experience. Influencing factors on immersive media experience are elaborated as well as the assessment of immersive media experience. Finally, standardization activities related to IMEx are highlighted and the white paper is concluded with an outlook related to future developments.

Context. The reasons for recent landscape change in the European countryside are complex and poorly substantiated. Identification of drivers of landscape transition and assessment of the effects on the provision of landscape services are subject of recent debate.Objectives. Aims of the paper are to explore what implications rural landscape transitions (as identified by land use and land cover changes) have for the provision of landscape services, and whether these changes can be related to specific drivers of change.Methods. The paper records gross landscape change on the basis of land use and land cover changes in six case study areas in five countries, and assesses the impacts on the provision of landscape services in the past 25 years.Results. In the past decades the observed land use and land cover changes in the case studies are relatively small, with a dominance of urbanisation and afforestation processes. However, the impacts of these changes are clearly reflected in a change in landscape services.Conclusions. Although the landscape transitions do affect the services, spatial data alone is insufficient to assess cause-effect relationships of landscape transitions,landscape structure and pattern. Circumstantial evidence points to substantial effects of EU and national policies on landscape services through landscape transition. These—often unintentional—effects can substantially affect biodiversity, cultural identity and landscape character. More research is needed onthe exact cause-effect relationships between policies and landscape service provision.

This report introduces a new database of room impulse responses (RIRs) measured in an empty rectangular room using subwoofers as sound sources. The purpose of this database, publicly available for download, is to provide acoustic measurements within the frequency region of modal resonances. Performing acoustic measurements at low frequencies presents many difficulties, mainly related to ambient noise and to unavoidable nonlinearities of the subwoofer. In this report, it is shown that these issues can be addressed and partially solved by means of the exponential sine-sweep technique and a careful calibration of the measurement equipment. A procedure for estimating the reverberation time at very low frequencies is proposed, which uses a cosine-modulated filterbank and an approximation of the RIRs using parametric models in order to reduce problems related to low signal-to-noise ratio and to the length of typical band-pass filter responses.

The use of the term immersion to describe a multitude of varying experiences in the absence of a definitional consensus has obfuscated and diluted the term. The non-exhaustive literature review presented in this paper indicates that immersion is a psychological concept as opposed to being a property of the system or technology that facilitates an experience. An adaptable definition of immersion is synthesized based on the findings from the literature review: a state of deep mental involvement in which the individual may experience disassociation from the awareness of the physical world due to a shift in their attentional state. This definition is used to contrast and differentiate interchangeably used terms such as presence from immersion and outline the implications for conducting immersion research on audiovisual experiences. A new methodology for quantifying immersion is proposed and avenues for future work are briefly discussed.

An experiment was conducted to identify the perceptual effects of acoustical properties of domestic listening environments, in a stereophonic reproduction scenario. Nine sound fields, originating from four rooms, were captured and spatially reproduced over a three-dimensional loudspeaker array. A panel of ten expert assessors identified and quantified the perceived differences of those sound fields using their own perceptual attributes. A multivariate analysis revealed two principal dimensions that could summarize the sound fields of this investigation. Four perceptual constructs seem to characterize the sensory properties of these dimensions, relating to Reverberance, Width & Envelopment, Proximity, and Bass. Overall, the results signify the importance of reverberation in residential listening environments on the perceived sensory experience, and as a consequence, the assessors' preferences towards certain decay times. ispartof: JOURNAL OF THE ACOUSTICAL SOCIETY OF AMERICA vol:146 issue:5 pages:3562-3576 ispartof: location:United States status: published

The perceptual differences between the sound reproductions of headphones were investigated in a pair-wise comparison study. Two musical excerpts were reproduced over 21 headphones positioned on a mannequin and recorded. The recordings were then processed and reproduced over one set of headphones to listeners, who were asked to evaluate their perceived degree of dissimilarity. The two musical excerpts were used in separate experiments. The processing of the recordings consisted of compensating for the influences of the playback headphones worn by the listeners as well as for the mannequin's ear canals. A multidimensional scaling analysis revealed two dominating perceptual dimensions used by the listeners to differentiate the reproductions of the headphones. These dimensions were similar for the two musical excerpts. Objective metrics are proposed to describe them, leading to correlations ranging from 0.89 to 0.97 between the dimensions and metrics. The first perceptual dimension was associated with the relative strength of bass, while the second dimension was related to the relative strength of the lower midrange.

This paper investigates the personal and property characteristics of landowners who use EU Rural Development agri-environmental schemes (AES), as well as their motives for participation or non-participation in such schemes. The study is based on a questionnaire survey with landowners, in selected study areas in the Netherlands, Denmark, Austria, Italy and Greece. Our principal findings show that AES tend to attract more the owners of larger farms, who are frequently full-time, younger, post-primary school educated and agriculturally-trained farmers. The latter findings are contingent on local geographical particularities and on subjective factors, farmers' individualities, different rural cultures, landscape types, EU and national policies and special needs of the study areas—all areas where agricultural production is increasingly marginalized, for different reasons. Subsidy scheme participation motives did not seem to be strictly economic; they also regarded personal satisfaction. They are all together generally appeared to be place specific, since the respondents from peri-urban Northern European areas were more motivated to participate in AES than respondents from Central and Southern European areas with marginal potential for agriculture. Motives for non-participation were also found to be dependent on the level of farming engagement and on case-area landscape types.

We utilize the close link between Cohen’s d , the effect size in an ANOVA framework, and the Thurstonian (Signal detection) d -prime to suggest better visualizations and interpretations of standard sensory and consumer data mixed model ANOVA results. The basic and straightforward idea is to interpret effects relative to the residual error and to choose the proper effect size measure. For multi-attribute bar plots of F -statistics this amounts, in balanced settings, to a simple transformation of the bar heights to get them transformed into depicting what can be seen as approximately the average pairwise d -primes between products. For extensions of such multi-attribute bar plots into more complex models, similar transformations are suggested and become more important as the transformation depends on the number of observations within factor levels, and hence makes bar heights better comparable for factors with differences in number of levels. For mixed models, where in general the relevant error terms for the fixed effects are not the pure residual error, it is suggested to base the d -prime-like interpretation on the residual error. The methods are illustrated on a multifactorial sensory profile data set and compared to actual d -prime calculations based on Thurstonian regression modeling through the ordinal package. For more challenging cases we offer a generic “plug-in” implementation of a version of the method as part of the R -package SensMixed . We discuss and clarify the bias mechanisms inherently challenging effect size measure estimates in ANOVA settings.

Søren Bech and Jon Francombe provide an illustration of how sensory analysis is undertaken in the audio industry. They demonstrate how the industry attempts to quantify the listener’s imagination—which is taken to include a range of modifiers of the listener’s auditory experience including mood, expectation, and previous experience—in order to ensure that the end result, the listener’s auditory experience or impression after the audio transmission chain, matches the intended experience as closely as possible. An example is provided of sensory analysis used for qualitative and quantitative evaluation of the listening experience in a personal sound zone. A perceptual model has been developed to reliably predict a listener’s sense of distraction (due to interfering audio) from the experience of listening to audio intended for a particular zone.

International audience; The fragmentation of agricultural land is influenced by political, economic, social, ecological and environmental factors, which affect its dynamics, patterns, structures, and functions. However, a deep analysis aimed at examining agricultural land fragmentation and its driving forces, and predicting future agricultural land fragmentation is needed. We investigated the degree of fragmentation in a case study in Torres Vedras municipality (Portugal). This territory has experienced significant agricultural land use changes in the last twenty years, mainly in the form of agricultural intensification and land fragmentation. The purposes of the study are: (1) to identify different degrees of agricultural land fragmentation; (2) to analyse and recognize underlying driving forces; (3) to identify the effect of scale; (4) and to predict agricultural land fragmentation for 2025 in a business as usual scenario. This approach concentrates on a cluster analysis to define the agricultural land fragmentation and a multi-layer perceptron to project agricultural land fragmentation. The results indicate that a 5 by 5 km scale of analysis is more efficient than 2 by 2 km to identify the most influential driving forces, in which human activities are one of the main causes of agricultural land fragmentation. In addition, the results also predict that agricultural land fragmentation will increase in 2025. These outcomes should be used to forecast agricultural land fragmentation and to reduce negative impacts.

This work concentrates on validating a real-time perceptual model predicting distraction caused by audio-on-audio interference. The real-time model was recently developed on the basis of another successfully validated, perceptual distraction model, which is not able to calculate predictions in real time. Both models are non-blind, i.e., their inputs take target and interferer signals separately. This paper describes a validation experiment for the real-time distraction model, which compares the model's predictions to subjective distraction ratings obtained from a listening experiment. The accuracy of the real-time model is also compared to that of the original distraction model. The calculated root-mean-squared errors for a speech zone and a music zone were 10.2% and 12.6% for the real-time model, respectively, compared to 11.3% and 11.5% for the original model. The results indicate that the real-time model is able to predict the distraction with similar accuracy as the original model, and thus, is a suitable tool for sound-zone evaluation. Furthermore, the real-time capability of the model is considered to be vital for certain applications, including the evaluation of adaptive sound zones.