Spatially Augmented Audio Delivery: Applications of Spatial Sound Awareness in Sensor-Equipped Indoor Environments

Current mainstream audio playback paradigms do not take any account of a user’s physical location or orientation in the delivery of audio through headphones or speakers. Thus audio is usually presented as a static perception whereby it is naturally a dynamic 3D phenomenon audio environment. It fails to take advantage of our innate psychoacoustical perception that we have of sound source locations around us. Described in this paper is an operational platform which we have built to augment the sound from a generic set of wireless headphones. We do this in a way that overcomes the spatial awareness limitation of audio playback in indoor 3D environments which are both locationaware and sensor-equipped. This platform provides access to an audio-spatial presentation modality which by its nature lends itself to numerous cross-dissiplinary applications. In the paper we present the platform and two demonstration applications.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: MDM
• Authors: Graham Healy, Alan F. Smeaton
• Keywords: Audio Playback, Audio Playback Paradigms, Communications, MDM 2009, Phenomenon Audio Environment