Temporal and amplitude aspects in sonically simulating walking over bumps, holes and flat surfaces

Abstract

This paper describes an experiment whose goal is to assess the role of temporal and amplitude variations in sonically simulating the act of walking over a bump or a hole. In particular, it has been investigated whether the timing between heel and toe and the timing between footsteps, as well as variations in the amplitude of heel and toe affect the perception of walking on unflat surfaces. Forty five subjects participated to three between-subjects experiments where they were asked to interact with a desktop system simulating bumps, holes and flat surfaces by means of auditory cues. Results show that it is possible to simulate a bump or a hole by only using temporal information in the auditory modality. Furthermore results show that the proposed amplitude variations are not sufficient to provide the information concerning uneven surfaces.

Footstep sounds synthesis: Design, implementation, and evaluation of foot–floor interactions, surface materials, shoe types, and walkers’ features

“…The developed synthesizer and its control techniques can find application in several interactive and non-interactive contexts such as virtual reality (e.g., navigation in virtual environments) [83], entertainment (e.g., video games, movies) [31,79], or perceptual studies aiming at investigating the role of the action-perception loop in locomotion [80,84,85].…”

“…Along the same line, it is possible to manipulate the sound descriptors ''time between steps'' to simulate different surface profile, such as bumps, holes, and flat surfaces, by leveraging the findings reported by Turchet and Serafin [31] that showed that variations in T are sufficient for this purpose. The simulation of climbing and descending staircases can be achieved by tuning several aspects of the synthesizer, such as different types of exciter to model the type of foot-floor interaction, different set of parameters controlling the ground models, variations in temporal distance between steps.…”

“…Finally, the study reported by Turchet and Serafin [31] investigated the role of temporal and amplitude aspects in sonically simulating the act of walking on bumps, holes and flat surfaces. In particular, it was investigated whether the timing between heel and toe and the timing between footsteps, as well as variations in sound level of each step in the sequence, affected perception of walking on uneven surfaces.…”

“…At a given speed, one can walk or run with infinite combinations of l and f. In general, however, in order to increase walking or running speed, humans jointly increase l and f [67]. At auditory level, however, the fundamental parameter to recognize v is only T, while l plays a minor role [68,31]. In addition, according to the results reported in [43,67], v is related to the GRF such that the higher the v the greater the GRF's amplitude and the shorter the GRF's duration.…”