Background

Despite the improvement of hearing technology over recent years, people with hearing loss often struggle with sound localization in their daily lives. This struggle can impact their quality of life, especially when it comes to things like perceiving incoming traffic or understanding conversations in noisy environments. Recent studies, however, have suggested that the brain can be trained to localize sound using only one ear, meaning that there is a requirement for accessible training programs in both an educational and clinical setting.

Objective

This project aims to create a Virtual Reality (VR) program that can help individuals improve their sound localization abilities. Using a naturalistic environment, the program’s difficulty will increase steadily as the user becomes more accurate, with the visual cues decreasing and ambient noise around them increasing throughout the experience. By setting it up in this way, both clinicians and the user have definitive markers of success and improvement, and can measure how their accuracy steadily increases with more use. By creating this program, we are creating a teaching tool that can help train Audiologists, but we are also creating a tool that can help individuals improve their quality of life.

The Team

Principal Investigators

• Dr. Doug Sladen, Associate Professor, Faculty of Medicine
• Dr. Valter Ciocca, Professor, Faculty of Medicine
• Dr. Joanne Whitehead, Bioinformatician, BC Children’s Hospital

Volunteer

• Eli Hason, Sound Designer, Wabi Sabi Sound

Current Student Team

• Eric Tang, Developer (September 2024-Present)
• Sinnie Choi, Project Lead, UI/UX Designer (September 2024-Present)
• Mark Harmon, Developer (January 2025-Present)

Past Student Team

• Julien Roy, Project Lead, Developer (September 2024-December 2024)

Staff Team

• Frederik Svendsen, Staff Developer (September 2024-Present)
• James Edralin (September 2024-Present)