Wait a minute, she tells you "front right" and then you hear it as coming from the front, and when she tells you rear right you hear it as coming from the rear? That sounds like it could be suggestion to me. As an experiment, try it on an unsuspecting friend with the headphones on backwards and see what they say.
It is my understanding that you get a crude sense of direction from the slight time difference between the time it takes a sound to reach each ear, and you get accuracy from moving your head and additional cues such as reflected sound. In high school, I remember reading about an elegant experiment demonstrating the importance of head motion in directional hearing. In the experiment, microphones were attached to the ears of a mannequin head and connected to headphones of a test subject, with both heads pointing the same direction. When the mannequin head was fixed, the subject had very little accuracy in determining the direction that sounds came from. But when the mannequin's head was strapped on top the subject's head and could move with the subject, then the subject's accuracy was greatly improved. Supposedly, 3D headphones work by exaggerating the interference patterns you naturally hear by having sounds from a source reach each ear at different times. To me, this sounds more like producing a hyper-realistic sensation than contributing much in the way of extra information. Everyone's sensory experience is interpreted, and there are experiments galore that show that what we "hear" depends an awful lot on our expectations and visual cues. So it could be for example that in your game you "hear" someone sneaking up behind you because you don't see them on the screen.
Come on over than and I'll show you. When she says "Front Right" it definitely sounds forward of when she says "Rear Right". No movement is needed. It may be nice to factor in movement for pinning down a noise in the game world, but more often in games I just want to know if I'm being attacked from the rear. There's little time for waving the head around to try to figure out _where_ behind me the sound is coming from.
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