For multimodal display systems in which realistic reproduction of impact events is desired, presenting structure-borne vibration along with multichannel audio recordings has been observed to create a greater sense of immersion in a virtual acoustic environment. Furthermore, there is an increased proportion of reports that the impact event took place within the observer's local area (this is termed "presence with" the event, in contrast to "presence in" the environment in which the event occurred). While holding the audio reproduction constant, varying the intermodal arrival time and level of mechanically-displayed, synthetic whole-body vibration revealed a number of other subjective attributes that depend upon multimodal interaction in the perception of a representative impact event. For example, when the structure-borne component of the displayed impact event arrived 10 to 20 ms later than the airborne component, the inter-modal delay was not only tolerated, but gave rise to an increase in the proportion of reports that the impact event had greater power. These results have enabled the refinement of a multimodal simulation in which the manipulation of synthetic whole-body vibration can be used to control perceptual attributes of impact events heard within an acoustic environment reproduced via a multi-channel loudspeaker array.
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