ABSTRACT
Audition, like vision, is fundamental to our understanding of the world. However, in the design of virtual worlds, audition has been a poor cousin to vision, having largely been relegated to trivial enhancements of visualizations. Considering virtual world design from the standpoint of Biocca's (1994) "Communication Design Matrix" (a means of evaluating communication media; see Table 9.1), auditory display techniques can touch every aspect of a comprehensive communications system. This chapter investigates sound and the immersive interface from this comprehensive perspective.
