Tangible user interface for the exploration of auditory city maps

  • Authors:

  • Martin Pielot;Niels Henze;Wilko Heuten;Susanne Boll

  • Affiliations:

  • OFFIS, Institute for Information Technology, Oldenburg, Germany;OFFIS, Institute for Information Technology, Oldenburg, Germany;OFFIS, Institute for Information Technology, Oldenburg, Germany;University of Oldenburg, Oldenburg, Germany

  • Venue:
  • HAID'07 Proceedings of the 2nd international conference on Haptic and audio interaction design
  • Year:
  • 2007

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Abstract

Before venturing out into unfamiliar areas, most people scope out a map. But for the blind or visually impaired traditional maps are not accessible. In our previous work, we developed the "Auditory Map" which conveys the location of geographic objects through spatial sonification. Users perceive these objects through the virtual listener's ears walking through the presented area. Evaluating our system we observed that the participants had difficulties perceiving the directions of geographic objects accurately. To improve the localization we introduce rotation to the Auditory Map. Rotation is difficult to achieve with traditional input devices such as a mouse or a digitizer tablet. This paper describes a tangible user interface which allows rotating the virtual listener using physical representations of the map and the virtual listener. First evaluation results show that our interaction technique is a promising approach to improve the construction of cognitive maps for visually impaired people.