It has been demonstrated that personality traits, such as empathy and the tendency to become immersed in tasks, correlate with increased experience of presence in virtual reality. However, it is not clear whether this translates directly to the experience of externalisation of spatially rendered audio in virtual environments. Relationships between factors were explored by comparing quality of experience with personality and cognitive factors including empathy, systematisation, visual precedence, and sensitivity to aural differences. The results suggest that psychological aspects which are related to the experience of presence in virtual reality are not the same as those which are associated with the experience of perceiving audio as an externalised event.
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