  As an embodied and spatial medium, virtual reality is proving an attractive
proposition for robot teleoperation in hazardous environments. This paper
examines a nuclear decommissioning scenario in which a simulated team of
semi-autonomous robots are used to characterise a chamber within a virtual
nuclear facility. This study examines the potential utility and impact of
sonification as a means of communicating salient operator data in such an
environment. However, the question of what sound should be used and how it can
be applied in different applications is far from resolved. This paper explores
and compares two sonification design approaches. The first is inspired by the
theory of cognitive metaphor to create sonifications that align with socially
acquired contextual and ecological understanding of the application domain. The
second adopts a computationalist approach using auditory mappings that are
commonplace in the literature. The results suggest that the computationalist
approach outperforms the cognitive metaphor approach in terms of predictability
and mental workload. However, qualitative data analysis demonstrates that the
cognitive metaphor approach resulted in sounds that were more intuitive, and
were better implemented for spatialisation of data sources and data legibility
when there was more than one sound source.
