Auditory cues for directions and distance
Smart phones
provide facilities that can be used in new ways to help the visually
challenged. They can also be used to help vehicle operators like pilots and car
drivers. They could be important in special environments like space and
underwater.
Imagine a
visually challenged student on the school playgrounds. A beep-beep sound at a
set frequency can give him information about the direction and distance of the
entrance of the main building from his current position. Assuming that he
listens to this information through stereo earphones, the directional cue could
be given by a suitable, short delay between the signals sent to the two ears.
Further, the signal sent to the ear facing the school main gate could be louder
by a computed amount. Important locations like the main building entrance could
be marked by a cell phone acting as a GPS beacons for this purpose, broadcasting
an ID number and a code indicating the nature of auditory cue that the listener
should receive. The student’s smartphone would have a good compass that gives
the software a reading of the direction the student is facing at a given
instance. In future there could be a gyroscopic sensor to provide short term
accuracy in direction sensing.
It is possible
to represent a direction, say north, by a steady whistle at a low volume. This
could be in the form of a common complex waveform sent to the two ears, but one
of them being delayed in a suitable manner, enabling the user to sense where
north is in relation to the direction he is facing.
Multiple
locations can be represented simultaneously by different types of beeps. Two
dimensions are available to uniquely identify a signal – one being the number
of beeps/second, and the other, the frequency of the underlying sub-carrier
that carries the beep. Either one of these cues could give distance
information.
Some
interesting research questions are:
1. How many different locations can be
signaled effectively?
2. Can we offer training to increase the
number of locations that a user can be aware of at a given time?
3. What are the best ways of presenting
distance/direction information to a user?
4. Do we always need earphones? Or, can
we use stereo-speakers in a car to give the driver some information about cars near
him that he cannot see?
5. Can the car speakers also give the
driver information about other vehicles approaching or receding from his own?
Can this, for instance, be done by change of the sub-carrier frequency carrying
the beeps representing one of the nearby cars?
6. What is a good auditory code to
represent a section of a street? For instance, could a street be represented by
a few virtual objects moving up and down the street, sending appropriate beeps?
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