Introduction
The immersive experience allowed by VR headsets holds much promise for hearing assessment within more realistic listening environments than are usually found in audiological tests - ones that include visual information, spatialised sound and everyday settings. However, realising the promise of VR-based assessment requires both new audiovisual materials compatible with the headsets and software tools for composition and running of tests. Existing resources are still rather limited in scope. Hear-VR is a new corpus of audiovisual materials designed for intelligibility testing in VR.
Contents
British English matrix sentences were recorded in our anechoic chamber against a green screen, using a 360° camera and a high-quality condenser microphone. These sentences contain 5 slots with 10 choices in each slot. Different sets of 200 sentences were recorded by 5 male and 5 female talkers sitting at a table. The individual talkers have been cropped from the videos and the green screen and table replaced by a transparent background to allow compositing of speakers in new 360° scenes. The individual matrix sentences have been extracted as 11s videos together with level-normalised monophonic audio. We have developed scripts that build multi-talker videos from these elements in a format that can be played on VR Headsets such as the Oculus 2. We have also developed a Unity application for the headsets, which will play the 360° composite videos and create spatialised sound sources for the talkers together with background noise delivered from multiple virtual loudspeakers.
