Estimation of detection threshold of system latency of virtual auditory display

When a virtual auditory display (VAD) is responsive to a listener’s head movement, high precision of sound localization can be obtained. However, when the system latency (SL) is detectable to the listener, he/she feels that the virtual world is unnatural. Therefore, SL should be sufficiently smaller than the detection threshold (DT). Few researchers have examined DT and little information on the inter-subject differences has been reported. Thus, DT was investigated in more detail in this study. We conducted two kinds of experiments and examined the DT and difference limen (DL). Findings showed the estimated average DT and DL for listeners to be 45 ms and 59 ms, respectively. It was confirmed that the respective sensitivities d′ derived from each of the two experiments are strongly correlated with each other (r = 0.90 (p < .01)).