Sound parameters for expressing geographic distance in a mobile navigation application

Abstract

This paper presents work on finding acoustic parameters suitable to convey a sense of difference in geographic distance through the concepts of "near", "middle" and "far". The context for use is a mobile application for navigation services. A set of acoustic parameters was selected based on how sound naturally travels through and is dispersed by the atmosphere. One parameter without direct acoustic connection to distance was also selected. Previous works corroborate the choice of parameters in the context of the project. Results show that modulating multiple parameters simultaneously to express distance gives a more robust experience of difference in distance compared to modulating single parameters. The ecological parameters low-pass filter and reverb gave the test's subjects the most reliable and consistent experience of difference in distance. Modulating the parameter pitch alone was seen to be an unreliable method. Combining the pitch parameter with the reverb parameter gave more robust results.

Using sound to enhance users' experiences of mobile applications

“…The more far away a POI was, the more low-pass filtering was applied, the more reverberation was added and the lower its pitch was. This is in accordance with recommendations found in [26]. A side effect of the low-pass filtering is that the sound would appear to be more silent the more filtering that was applied.…”

A Wearable Multimodal Interface for Exploring Urban Points of Interest

“…In addition to haptics, audio has been used in many ways in tour guide applications and related systems. The use of sound in these systems can be categorized to guidance cues [11,20,15], notifications [15], contextual sounds [22,33,21], and spoken information content [21].…”

“…The application also made use of various notification sounds, e.g., to indicate that the person should exit the bus at the next stop. A different guidance scheme was used by Liljedahl and Lindberg [20], who developed a target scanning application with auditory proximity cues to relevant places in the direction where the mobile device was pointing.…”

Navigating by audio-based probing and fuzzy routing

“…When compared to the related work, our main contributions are in probing, fuzzy routing, sensor usage, and how information is presented with binaural audio and sound properties. The audio design and the field tests are discussed also in [3], [8]. We do not present the details of the audio design in this paper but describe in more detail the operation principle and implementation of the PING!…”