Exploring Manipulating In-VR Audio To Facilitate Verbal Interactions Between VR Users And Bystanders

Abstract

Despite recent work investigating how VR users can be made aware of bystanders, few have explored how bystander-VR user interactions may be facilitated by, for example, increasing the user's auditory awareness so they can better converse with bystanders. Through a lab study (N=15) we investigated 4 approaches of manipulating in-VR audio to facilitate verbal interactions between a VR user and bystander: (1) dynamically reducing application volume, (2) removing background audio, (3) removing sound effects and (4) removing all audio. Our results show audio manipulations can be used to significantly improve a VR user's auditory awareness at the cost of reducing sense of presence in VR. They also show most preferred increased awareness be balanced with decreased presence in VR, however, they also identify a subset of participants who prioritised increasing awareness no matter the cost to presence. CCS CONCEPTS• Human-centered computing → Virtual reality.

Privacy-Enhancing Technology and Everyday Augmented Reality

“…For activity awareness, we can see immediate parallels with research such as FaceDisplay [49], where a future AR headset might incorporate a transparent display over the lens of the camera, providing a visual sense of what the user is doing [111]. Such feedback could be mandated at a platform level, reporting activities based on the requested APIs an application uses (e.g.…”

Re-Evaluating VR User Awareness Needs During Bystander Interactions

“…Since McGill et al's formative paper, much work has investigated a range of approaches to notify a VR user of bystander co-presence. Research has investigated the feasibility of text [10,38,42,54], audio [38,40] and haptic notifications [7,10], various avatar aesthetics [9,11,20,29,32,38,45,50], continuous vs temporary notification designs [35,38,54] and contextually increasing the amount of reality incorporated within the VR scene [9,29]. And while these works have proven VR users can successfully be notified of bystander existence, they are limited by focusing primarily on evaluating (a) whether the built system can successfully notify the VR user of bystander co-presence, and (b) what impact this has on the user's sense of presence [36,40].…”

“…Research has investigated the feasibility of text [10,38,42,54], audio [38,40] and haptic notifications [7,10], various avatar aesthetics [9,11,20,29,32,38,45,50], continuous vs temporary notification designs [35,38,54] and contextually increasing the amount of reality incorporated within the VR scene [9,29]. And while these works have proven VR users can successfully be notified of bystander existence, they are limited by focusing primarily on evaluating (a) whether the built system can successfully notify the VR user of bystander co-presence, and (b) what impact this has on the user's sense of presence [36,40]. As such, we lack a holistic understanding of how awareness systems might effectively fit together and be used in conjunction, so that users can experience bystander awareness which adapts to their context and optimizes for trade-offs around awareness/immersion in the process.…”

“…To overcome this, research and industry are increasingly examining technology-mediated reality awareness systems that support usage of VR devices by automatically increasing a user's awareness of and facilitating interactions with bystanders [10, 29, 32, 34-36, 38, 40, 50]. Yet, while prior works have established how individual, singular bystander awareness systems can successfully notify a VR user of bystander co-presence [10,29,32,38,45,50] or facilitate interactions [9,20,29,40,52], at present, we lack a holistic understanding of how we might bring together disparate work on bystander awareness into cohesive systems that provide the "right" awareness to the VR user (i.e. the need for awareness to vary based on the bystander's presence, proximity, actions, etc).…”

“…This provided an evaluation of the awareness systems modelled after the methodologies used in prior works (e.g. [10,29,32,40]). The second part, the Assessing Awareness Needs evaluation, then used our novel evaluation methodology to investigate how, when and why participants would use the 7 bystander awareness systems to increase their awareness during 14 bystander-VR user interaction scenarios through a think aloud exercise.…”