Current development and research in the area of psychoacoustics, audiology, and (binaural) hearing instrument technologies is often performed in simple and unrealistic laboratory environments. In contrast to field-studies, laboratory-based studies provide a high level of control and reproducibility, but the results often do not reflect real world experience. For example, hearing impaired listeners prefer very different hearing aid settings in laboratory environments than in the real world. Advanced hearing aid features, such as noise suppression or beamfoming, may provide significant benefits in simple laboratory environments, but these benefits often diminish in more realistic situations. Common speech intelligibility measures provide limited relevance due to their simplistic loudspeaker setups. In order to overcome most of these problems, real-world environments need to be realised inside a controlled laboratory setting, considering realistic audio (and visual) presentation and aspects such as listener’s engagement and cognitive processing.