Designing auditory pointers

Abstract

Sound can be used to give orientation, drag the listener's attention into a certain direction and provide navigational cues in virtual, as well as in physical environments. In analogy to the concept of visual pointers we call such sounds Auditory Pointers. While previous work mainly focused on the spacial localization property of sounds, we would like to complement this by using properties of the sound itself. Properties, like loudness, timbre, and pitch, can be used to sonify distance and direction to a target point. In this paper, we describe an exemplary implementation of respective sound synthesis techniques and investigate the effectiveness of different properties in a user study. The findings reveal big differences between the sound parameters and give clues for functional sound design.

Navigation in an Audio-only First Person Adventure Game

“…They also computed the directional accuracy, which is the mean deviation of the angle between the optimal and the real direction of mouse movement. Based on these measurements, Lorenz and Schuster conclude that tempo, pitch and timbre performs best while "stereo panning [...] seem[s] hardly suitable for navigation tasks" [7]. Of course their navigation task was clearly different than ours.…”

“…An example of an audio board games is "Blind Gamers Hearts". 7 It is an adaptation of the card game "Hearts" where a computer voice announces the active player and his placed card. The player then uses the arrow keys to scroll through his cards, each card being read aloud.…”

“…But audio navigation in an audio-only computer game does not have to rely on real-world acoustics. Completely new mappings could be used, e.g., those proposed and examined by Lorenz and Schuster [7]. They modulated various parameters of a synthesizer (including pitch, tempo, LFO, reverberation, panning and timbre) by the distance between the mouse cursor and the target.…”