The Missing Next Step: Sound, Agency, and Plausibility in Virtual Reality — A Narrative Review

Sound plays a critical role in virtual reality (VR), shaping attention, narrative comprehension, emotional engagement, and experiential plausibility under conditions of embodiment and user agency. Although a growing body of research addresses VR audio techniques, perceptual effects, and sound taxonomies, existing approaches remain fragmented and largely descriptive. In particular, they do not provide a unifying, VR-specific account of how sound meaning and emotional intent are operationally linked to user agency and non-linear narrative progression. This paper presents a narrative review of selected literature spanning game audio frameworks, immersive sound design, narrative theory, and plausibility-related research in games and VR. Through synthesis of these perspectives, the review identifies a conceptual gap in current research, namely the absence of a VR-specific, agency-coupled sound design framework for structuring sound meaning and emotional intent in support of experiential plausibility as users actively shape events in interactive VR environments.