Investigating Three-dimensional Directional Guidance with Nonvisual Feedback for Target Pointing Task

Sound-Guided 2-D Navigation: Effects of Information Concurrency and Coordinate System

“…Nevertheless, we argue that our finding related to sequential v/s concurrent AG presentation is generalizable to other designs as well. First of all, the tendency of users to navigate axis by axis has been observed not only when using visual displays [8] but also when using very different and unrelated 2-D AG designs [6,41]. Sequential AG facilitates this approach by minimizing the effect of perceptual interactions [29] and providing salient waypoints, and is therefore likely to enable superior performance when applied to other types of 2-D and 3-D AG designs too.…”

“…This behavior was not exhibited when visual guidance was provided; users manipulated multiple dimensions at once and followed more direct navigation paths [41]. Chung et al [6] observed a similar axis-by-axis tendency where users first navigated horizontally using and then vertically. Due to each axis being given a separate sonic representation in the Cartesian AG schemes [4,12,41], we argue that these designs were the auditory equivalent of a visual display with X-and Y-coordinates printed separately on-screen and updated in real-time.…”

“…Due to each axis being given a separate sonic representation in the Cartesian AG schemes [4,12,41], we argue that these designs were the auditory equivalent of a visual display with X-and Y-coordinates printed separately on-screen and updated in real-time. Such a visual display was tested as a virtual navigation aid by Darken et al [8], who observed similar behavior to [6,41] -the users treated movement along each dimension separately. These findings suggest that that regardless of the sensory modality, even if positional information is concurrently conveyed for each axis through a distinct 'information stream', users tend to sequentially tackle individual dimensions.…”

“…As sonifying both dimensions concurrently is prone to perceptual ambiguity, we propose that a more effective AG approach would be to sonify spatial dimensions sequentially (e.g.using 'two-step guidance' as it is termed in [6]). Such a scheme guides the user along each individual dimension serially until the target is reached.…”

“…Although 2/3-D navigation tasks are straightforward when using vision, it is relatively hard to convey multivariate navigation data through sound in an unambiguous manner [10,14,41]. Existing AG designs have usually been based on a concurrent or simultaneous mapping of each positional coordinate to a distinct sonic property [6,41]. Past experimental results indicate that the coordinate information may be more effectively conveyed to users by sonifying each spatial dimension sequentially instead, breaking up a 2-or 3-D navigation task into a series of 1-D sub-tasks.…”