Using Sound to Describe Scenes With Still and Moving Obstacles

Abstract

The information human get from sight and hearing sense are similar. With these correlations, there are many works that take this idea to describe the spatial information with sound. The previous works only described the nearest obstacle with the direction and distance information to sound. To let the user clearly understand the spatial information in the scene, we aim to develop the describing solution from spatial information to auditory information including direction, distance, boundary and speed info with the multiple obstacle descriptions. The participants took the experiment by controlling the character and avoiding the obstacles in the different scenarios to the destination via simulator. They were also asked to wear blindfold and listen to the auditory information of the obstacles around them instead of using sight. The results show that the participants got 2 out of 3 scenarios higher performance than the baseline auditory information with avoidance rate 85.33% and 95.33%.