AURALIZATION OF NOISE IN A VIRTUAL REALITY AIRCRAFT CABIN FOR PASSENGER WELL BEING USING HUMAN CENTRED APPROACH

Noise has affected aircraft since the dawn of aviation. Aircraft noise reduces comfort for passengers and crew inside the cabin and the cockpit, in addition to the structural problem created by the vibration on the aircraft structures. Acoustic characteristics of an aircraft are traditionally represented with numerical data or are in the form of pressure maps and color maps calculated at particular positions taking into account several parameters. Audializing this data, involving potential users, is possible on physical prototypes at the end of the product development requiring considerable time and cost resources. From the past decade, innovative technologies such as Extended Reality (XR) have paved their way towards digital transformation of the products augmenting Human Centred approach. In this paper, we present a novel adaptation of these technologies in developing a multi-sensory virtual aircraft cabin environment in order to provide realism and improve immersion for a user. A new concept to “auralize” the noise inside the virtual passenger cabin, combining numerical acoustics and XR technology has been proposed to develop a tool to evaluate passenger comfort and wellbeing before the prototypes are manufactured. Different solutions on modeling acoustics in a virtual reality cabin have been studied, developed and discussed.