An Investigation on Temporal Aspects in the Audio-Haptic Simulation of Footsteps Luca Turchet and Stefania Serafin Department of Architecture, Design and Media Technology, Aalborg University Copenhagen {tur,sts}@create.aau.dk Abstract. In this paper, we present an experiment whose goal is to as- sess the role of temporal aspects in sonically and haptically simulating the act of walking on a bump or a hole. In particular, we investigated whether the timing between heel and toe and the timing between foot- steps affected perception of walking on unflat surfaces. Results show that it is possible to sonically and haptically simulate a bump or a hole only by varying temporal information. Keywords: Footstep sounds, physical models, auditory feedback, hap- tic feedback. 1 Introduction Previous research on simulating walking sounds using physics based engines has focused on the act of walking on flat surfaces [2,4,3,14,11]. In the virtual reality community, few locomotion interfaces are able to render uneven grounds, and they have the disadvantage of being costly and cumbersome [5,6,8]. Recently, research has shown that it is possible to simulate the act of walking on unflat surfaces by only using visual cues [10]. Three parameters of camera motion were considered in the simulation: orientation, velocity and height, and their com- bination. The experiments were run both actively, having users wear an head mounted display, as well as passively, having users look at a video of the si- mulations. Results show that such visualization techniques successfully simulate bumps and holes located in the ground. These results are a development of pre- vious research on pseudo-haptic simulation [9]. This research was extended by implementing a multimodal (audio-visual) simulation of walking on a bump or a hole [16]. Results in this case showed that the auditory cues reinforce the visual cues when coherent cues are provided in both modalities. When subjects were exposed to conflicting cues, for example by simulating visually the act of walking on a bump and auditorily the act of walking on a hole, usually the visual cues are dominant, apart from when the velocity effect is the visual parameter var- ied. This might be due to the higher temporal resolution of the auditory system versus the visual system [21]. In this paper, we are interested in exploring the possibility of implementing such pseudo-haptic feedback from the sonic and haptic point of view. Recently, A. Vatakis et al. (Eds.): Time and Time Perception 2010, LNAI 6789, pp. 101–115, 2011. c  Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2011