A well-known issue in clinical audiology and hearing research is the level of abstraction of traditional experimental assessments and methods, which lack ecological validity and differ significantly from real-life experiences,
often resulting in unreliable outcomes. Attempts to deal
with this matter by, for example, performing experiments
in real-life contexts, can be problematic due to the difficulty of accurately identifying control-specific parameters
and events. Virtual and augmented reality (VR/AR) have
the potential to provide dynamic and immersive audiovisual experiences that are at the same time realistic and
highly controllable. Several successful attempts have been
made to create and validate VR-based implementations
of standard audiological and linguistic tests, as well as
to design procedures and technologies to assess meaningful and ecologically-valid data. Similarly, new viewpoints on auditory perception have been provided by looking at hearing training and auditory sensory augmentation, aiming at improving perceptual skills in tasks such
as speech understanding and sound-source localisation. In this contribution, we bring together researchers active in
this domain. We briefly describe experiments they have
designed, and jointly identify challenges that are still open
and common approaches to tackle them