Auditory Displays to Facilitate Object Targeting in 3D Space

Abstract

In both extreme and everyday situations, humans need to find nearby objects that cannot be located visually. In such situations, auditory display technology could be used to display information supporting object targeting. Unfortunately, spatial audio inadequately conveys sound source elevation, which is crucial for locating objects in 3D space. To address this, three auditory display concepts were developed and evaluated in the context of finding objects within a virtual room, in either low or no visibility conditions: (1) a one-time height-denoting “area cue,” (2) ongoing “proximity feedback,” or (3) both. All three led to improvements in performance and subjective workload compared to no sound. Displays (2) and (3) led to the largest improvements. This pattern was smaller, but still present, when visibility was low, compared to no visibility. These results indicate that persons who need to locate nearby objects in limited visibility conditions could benefit from the types of auditory displays considered here.

Moving Towards and Reaching a 3-D Target by Embodied Guidance: Parsimonious Vs Explicit Sound Metaphors

“…However, this experiment was conducted by moving an avatar in a virtual world, making it impossible to compare the latencies with our study. On the contrary, in [13], the participants were physically moving in a 3*3 m room while being immersed in a virtual environment thanks to a Virtual Reality (VR) headset. The target position on the horizontal axis was coded by spatialized sound and on the vertical axis by sound frequency.…”

“…Thus, some devices have a camera placed on the participant's head [5,9,22], while others position the camera on the hand or forearm of the participant [4,11,19]. Some combine the two approaches by using two cameras, one on the head and one on the hand [13,28], and use one or the other depending on the participant's progression through the task (distal guidance to navigate to the target, then proximal guidance to reach the target with the hand).…”

“…Verbal description in a guidance task may correspond to instructions such as "turn right", "turn left", etc [4,5,11,19,22,23,28]. However, verbal instructions are considered slow and cumbersome [13] since they disrupt the perception/action loop. Indeed, if the user moves the sensor too quickly, at the end of the verbal instruction, it may no longer be valid.…”

“…Spatial sonification consists in using the natural capacities of the auditory system to locate the position of a target by virtually rendering its position. This is a technique used in [5,9,10,13] to localize the target on the horizontal plane. Some [5, 9-11, 13, 23] also rely on non-spatial sonification, which uses the physical characteristics of sounds, such as pitch, intensity, tempo, brightness, etc., to convey guidance information.…”

Visual-auditory Volume Rendering of Dynamic Quantum Chemistry Molecular Fields

“…Auditory stimuli are wellknown tools in molecular structures interactive study (Liu and van der Heide, 2019) that is often considered as an alternative to haptic ones in the traditional area of their application. The reason is that it does not have to deal with haptic device limitations and allows for mapping and perception of a much wider range of properties (May et al, 2019).…”