Abstract Nowadays, Virtual and Augmented Reality technologies play a supportive role in many research fields. In cultural heritage, various examples are available, including storytelling and narratives, where they can provide immersive and enhanced experiences to visitors and tourists, especially for entertainment and educational purposes. This review aims to investigate the opportunities that soundscape design and advanced sonic interactions in virtual and augmented environments can bring to cultural heritage sites and museums in terms of presence, emotional content, and cultural dissemination. Nineteen-two papers have been identified through the PRISMA methodology, and a promising positive effect of sonic interaction on user experience in a virtual environment can be observed in various studies, notwithstanding a general lack of specific contributions on the use of sound rendering and audio spatialisation for improving such experiences. Moreover, this work identifies the main involved research areas and discusses the state-of-the-art best practices and case studies where sonic interactions may assume a central role. The final part suggests possible future directions and applications for more engaging and immersive storytelling in the cultural heritage domain.

In immersive Audio Augmented Reality, a virtual sound source should be indistinguishable from the existing real ones. This property can be evaluated with the co-immersion criterion, which encompasses scenes constituted by arbitrary configurations of real and virtual objects. Thus, we introduce the term Audio Augmented Virtuality (AAV) to describe a fully virtual environment consisting of auditory content captured from the real world, augmented by synthetic sound generation. We propose an experimental design in AAV investigating how simplified late reverberation (LR) affects the co-immersion of a sound source. Participants listened to simultaneous virtual speakers dynamically rendered through spatial Room Impulse Responses, and were asked to detect the presence of an impostor, i.e., a speaker rendered with one of two simplified LR conditions. Detection rates were found to be close to chance level, especially for one condition, suggesting a limited influence on co-immersion of the simplified LR in the evaluated AAV scenes. This methodology can be straightforwardly extended and applied to different acoustics scenes, complexities, i.e., the number of simultaneous speakers, and rendering parameters in order to further investigate the requirements for immersive audio technologies in AAR and AAV applications.