Multi-user interaction in virtual audio spaces

Abstract

Audio guides are a common way to provide museum visitors with an opportunity for personalized, self-paced information retrieval. However, this personalization conflicts with some of the reasons many people go to museums, i.e., to socialize, to be with friends, and to discuss the exhibit as they experience it [1]. We developed an interactive museum experience based on audio augmented reality that lets the visitor interact with a virtual spatial audio soundscape. In this paper, we present some new interaction metaphors we use in the design of this audio space, as well as some techniques to generate a group experience within audio spaces.

AudioTorch

“…This audio space contains several virtual sound sources which, through special filtering, are perceived as emerging from the physical space. These virtual sources can be part of a game [11], contain information about certain assets [1,2,15], or be used as a navigational aid that does not rely on the visual sense [4,6,10,13]. To create a realistic experience with sources that appear to be fixed in the physical space independent of the orientation of the listener's head, this orientation has to be measured.…”

MobiLAudio – a multimodal content delivery platform for geo-services

“…This is achieved by augmenting the physical environment using immersive, spatial audio and advanced user modelling methods. An interesting approach was taken by (Heller et al 2009) with the development of an interactive virtual tour where users can remain independent or can interact with other users on the tour, essentially 'checking in' with them. The ec(h)o system described in (Wakkary et al 2004;Droumeva 2005) uses an audio Ar interface that is used to deliver exhibition data based on a semantic structure and utilizes spatialized soundscapes to provide an immersive experience.…”

Audvert: Using Spatial Audio to Gain a Sense of Place

“…A large amount of research on these topics has focused on their deployment for museum exhibits [3] and outdoor, augmented-reality soundscape experiments [2]. In terms of its applications in way finding, earlier work has tended to focus on the audio modality as a basic means of A to B navigation [4,5], but more recently, researchers have focused on the specific problem of tourist way finding.…”

“…This was achieved by playing five audio sources and asking each participant to place five paper cubes on a map of the shopping mall that best matched the location of where sounds were originating from. The map was A3 in size and each cube was 2cm 3 . Direction scores were calculated depending on the cube placement angle of error.…”