Environment, body, cognition: spatial rendering of environmental sound and immersive experience in cinematic VR

Abstract

In cinematic virtual reality (CVR), users are visually situated within a 360-degree environment, yet environmental sound is often rendered in stereo or only weakly spatialised, producing an asymmetry between what is seen and what is heard. This thesis examines how the spatial rendering of environmental sound, as distinct from its content or quantity, shapes the immersive experience of head-mounted-display (HMD) CVR, and how subjective and physiological measures of that experience relate to one another. The work is grounded in an Environment–Body–Cognition framework integrating acoustic ecology, embodied audition, and auditory cognition, operationalised through a Stimulus–Organism–Response model.
A between-subjects experiment (N = 60) presented a pre-authored cyberpunk alley scene rendered identically in vision but differing in audio: full-sphere first-order ambisonics or matched stereo. Immersive experience was measured along four dimensions (perceived realness, spatial presence, attentional involvement, affective reactions) via the Ambisonics Immersion Evaluation Questionnaire (AIEQ), open-ended responses, and event-locked continuous heart-rate measurement.
Spatial rendering significantly increased all four AIEQ dimensions (all p < .001), with the largest effects on presence and attention. Physiological and qualitative data further show that spatial rendering modulates rather than amplifies affect, dampening startle for ambiguous cues while intensifying dramatically marked ones, and that the self-report and physiology correlation depends on the rendering format. Together these results show the four dimensions moving as a coupled system, and support a revised Environment–Body–Cognition framework in which environment, body, and cognition form a co-constructive loop, making environmental sound rendering a constitutive world-design decision.

Date of Award	19 Jul 2026
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	University of Nottingham
Supervisor	Filippo Gilardi (Supervisor), Levi Dean (Supervisor) & Richard Frenneaux (Supervisor)