EFFECT OF LARGE SYSTEM LATENCY OF VIRTUAL AUDITORY DISPLAY ON LISTENER’S HEAD MOVEMENT IN SOUND LOCALIZATION TASK

Virtual Auditory Display (VAD) technology is expected to en-able the development of new communication tools and many other related applications. However, in computer-network-based com-munications, large latencies can sometimes occur. Therefore, the influence of large system latency (SL), up to 2 s, on VAD-based sound localization tasks was investigated in terms of the precision and time course of sound localization performance by listeners en-gaged in head movements. A software VAD system developed by the authors on a Linux PC (with SL of 12 ms) was used in the ex-periments. Listeners were asked to indicate the location of a virtual sound source by moving their heads in order to face the direction of the perceived sound image. Virtual sound sources were presented to the listeners with one of seven amounts of system latency (12