11.2 The Physiology of Human Hearing

Figure 11.4: The physiology of the human auditory system. (Source: www.myvmc.com)

Human ears convert sound pressure waves into neural impulses, which ultimately lead to a perceptual experience. The anatomy of the human ear is shown in Figure 11.4. The ear is divided into outer, middle, and inner parts, based on the flow of sound waves. Recall from Section 5.3 the complications of eye movements. Although cats and some other animals can rotate their ears, humans cannot, which simplifies this part of the VR engineering problem.