Redirected Walking (RDW) is a method of guiding the user's walking trajectory during a VR experience by visually manipulating the images in the HMD without the user being aware of it. In some RDW studies, the addition of auditory cues (sounds emitted by objects in the virtual/cyber space) as well as visual cues (audiovisual redirection) has been considered, but its effectiveness has been limited. In contrast, this study investigated the effects of sounds emitted from the real/physical space (e.g. TV sound, washing machine sound) on the perception of RDW, rather than sounds in the virtual/cyber space. Experimental results showed that when a fixed sound source is presented at a certain location in real/physical space, the visual manipulation of RDWs may reduce the localisation accuracy for that sound source and thus improve the effect of RDWs (i.e. make the visual manipulation less noticeable).

The research results were published in the online preliminary version of the IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, a scientific journal of the IEEE (Institute of Electronics and Information Engineers), on 28 August 2023, and were orally presented at the largest important international conference in the field of VR, the IEEE Conference on Virtual Reality and 3D User Interfaces (IEEE VR & 3DUI 2024, 16-21 March, Orlando, USA), the most important international conference in the field of VR.