Audio-Visual Perception-The Perception of Object Material in a Virtual Environment

A digital approach to audio-visual perception of object material and mass within unimodal and multimodal conditions. Similar research has been executed regarding the perception of physical object material, however little has been accomplished relating to virtual perceptions of object material. This study evaluates the effects of manipulating specific stimuli when inducing cross modal augmentation, intersensory biases and cross modal transfers. Three test conditions were established in order to determine perceptual accuracies and mass type dominance: auditory only stimuli, visual only stimuli and audio-visual stimuli.
The results indicated that multimodal perception was more accurate when perceiving object material and that vision was most dominant within unisensory conditions. No dominance was found within a multimodal environment when there was object incongruency, however when the visual stimuli was obscure, the auditory modality confirmed the final perception.