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PhD researcher at Eindhoven University of Technology, used virtual reality to study audiovisual synchrony perception, or how people judge whether sound and image happen together in time. Fucci from the Human-Technology Interaction group examined how distance and acoustic context shape this perception.

Digital Worlds
In today鈥檚 society, people interact not only with each other but also with digital and mediated environments. From communication and entertainment to immersive training, people often assume that what they see and hear belongs to the same event.
Fucci鈥檚 research at the Industrial Engineering and Innovation Sciences department, conducted within the Human-Technology Interaction group HTI, investigated how people judge whether sound and image are synchronous at different distances. In particular, she studied whether people account for the increasing delay of sound as an event moves farther away, and whether this depends on the acoustic information available in the environment.

Virtual reality was used as a controlled research tool. It allowed distance, audiovisual timing, visual information, and acoustic conditions to be changed systematically while other aspects of the environment remained consistent.

Time Shift
In the physical world, light reaches the eyes much faster than sound reaches the ears. The farther away an event occurs, the later its sound reaches the listener. Despite this difference, people often still experience sound and image as happening together.
Fucci studied whether people adjust their synchrony judgements to account for this delay. She also measured the technical delays introduced by VR displays, audio processing, rendering, and other parts of the system, as these can influence the timing experienced by the user.

Distance Matters
The results show that distance-related audiovisual synchrony perception is conditional rather than universal. In an indoor virtual environment with room reflections, participants partly adjusted their synchrony judgements as distance increased. This pattern was not found in an outdoor environment. It also disappeared when room reflections were removed from the indoor scene. The findings show that people do not use one fixed timing rule across environments. Their judgements depend on the acoustic context and the available information about the distance of the sound source.

Hidden Gap
The research also shows that VR cannot be treated as a neutral research tool. Participants often experienced virtual objects as closer than they were designed to be. In the indoor environment, perceived distances were on average about one-third shorter than the distances defined in the virtual scene.
Fucci also explored a simple, low-cost method to measure delays between the audio and visual parts of VR systems. These delays varied across hardware and software configurations and could influence synchrony judgements. Measuring perceived distance and system delay was therefore necessary to interpret the results correctly.

Real Challenges
The findings contribute primarily to the broader understanding of human multisensory perception. They clarify how people combine sound and vision across distance and why previous studies may have produced different results under different acoustic and technical conditions. The work also has implications for researchers, entrepreneurs, and developers working with virtual environments. In applications where users need to interpret events accurately, audiovisual timing should not be treated as a fixed technical setting.

Better Fit
Fucci shows that audiovisual synchrony perception cannot be explained by sound-travel time alone. It also depends on perceived distance, room acoustics, available sound-based distance information, individual differences, and system delays.
The research demonstrates both the value and the limitations of virtual reality as a tool for studying human perception. These findings can help researchers interpret audiovisual perception more accurately and support the design of virtual environments that better match how people experience space and time.

Victoria Fucci defended her thesis on July 1, 2026.
Title of the thesis: .
Supervisors: Raymond Cuijpers, Wijnand IJsselsteijn, Myrthe Plaisier, and the late Armin Kohlrausch