Differences in Human Audio Localization Performance between a HRTF- and a non-HRTF Audio System

Spatial audio solutions have been around for a long time in real-time applications, but yielding spatial cues that more closely simulate real life accuracy has been a computational issue, and has often been solved by hardware solutions. This has long been a restriction, but now with more powerful computers this is becoming a lesser and lesser concern and software solutions are now applicable. Most current virtual environment applications do not take advantage of these im- plementations of accurate spatial cues, however. This paper compares a common implementation of spatial audio and a head-related transfer function (HRTF) system implemen- tation in a study in relation to precision, speed and navi- gational performance in localizing audio sources in a virtual environment. We found that a system using HRTFs is signif- icantly better at all three performance tasks than a system using panning.