Can our auditory perception be used to trick our visual perception? "Our consciousness lags 80 milliseconds behind actual events...The 80-millisecond rule plays all sorts of perceptual tricks on us. As long as a hand-clapper is less than 30 meters away, you hear and see the clap happen together. But beyond this distance, the sound arrives more than 80 milliseconds later than the light, and the brain no longer matches sight and sound. What is weird is that the transition is abrupt: by taking a single step away from you, the hand-clapper goes from in sync to out of sync." source

This made me curious - say we have the following experiment based on the above:


A subject (listening subject) wears headphones synchronized with the hand-clapper
the hand-clapper starts from 5 meters away and slowly moves to 60 meters away

during this time, the listening subject would hear a clapping sound as they would naturally hear the sound based on the distance of the hand-clapper



If, once the hand-clapper reaches 60 meters, the audio is tweaked such that the listening subject would hear the hand-clapping sound as if the hand-clapper were only 5 meters away: 


  Would your typical listening subject visually perceive the
  hand-clapper as having suddenly moved closer (similar to the concept of how we perceive the moon as being "larger" when it's closer
  to the horizon)?
  
  In other words -- under what circumstances, if any, can sound influence
  our visual perception of depth/proximity?
I don't buy it the claim made in the quote. The speed of sound is roughly 1 foot per millsecond so even if you take a large 3 foot step you are changing the audio visual onset asynchrony by only 3 ms. What this means is that if you present a flash and a click with various onset asynchrony to subjects you would expect there to be a narrow range of lags (less than 3 ms) over which they stop reporting that the flash occurred first. This study was run by van Eijk et al (2008): 

The relevant data are the temporal order judgements (TOJ) and it is clear that it is a smooth transition between thinking the flash was first and the click was first and not an abrupt step. Further, the transition takes around 200 ms or to get back to the original claim, about 100 steps. The 80 ms claim seems reasonable in that you do not consistently report the visual stimulus as occurring first more than 70% of the time until it occurs more than 80 ms before the sound.