Normal hearing assessment of horizontal auditory localization accuracy in a virtual visual environment with free head movement

37 right-handed sighted and normal hearing volunteers perform an auditory localization task in a virtual visual environment. We investigated the contribution of head movements to localization along the interaural plane in absence of motor constraints and visual cues on a virtual scene, experienced by individuals wearing a head-mounted display while listening to stimuli coming from a circular loudspeaker array. Our results indicate that the localization errors progressively contract toward a constant minimum with increasing head motion. Reported are: the participant anonymous id ("Subject"), the condition ("Condition": 1 participants could hear and see the array of loudspeakers while wearing an HMD on top of their head in ways that their vision was not occluded by the device; 2 participants instead wore the HMD correctly, so as to be visually immersed in a virtual environment (VE) meanwhile still listening to the sounds coming from the loudspeaker array), group ("Group": 1 performed first condition 1, then 2; 2 performed condition 2, then 1), target ("Target": angle in sexagesimal degrees), the signed error ("Signed_error": the difference between the target angle and the pointed angle), the unsigned error ("Unsigned_error": the absolute difference between the target angle and the pointed angle), the distance of the head from the target in the moment when it was hit ("Head_position": in meters), the difference between the target and head orientation angle at the same moment ("Head_rotation": in degrees), the head covered distance during a single trial ("Head_distance": in meters) the velocity and acceleration of the head’s translation movement with respect to the x-axis of the frontal plane (respectively "Head_translation_1" in meters per second and "Head_translation_2" in meters per squared second), the angular velocity and acceleration of the head with respect to the z-axis of the frontal plane (respectively "Head_rotation_1" in degrees per second and "Head_rotation_2" in degrees per squared second), the number of direction changes and rotation changes with respect to the translation and angular movements (respectively "Head_direction_changes" and "Head_rotation_changes"), the latency during a single trial ("Latency": in seconds).