Placing the participants of a spatial audio conference call

  • Authors:

  • Mansoor Hyder;Michael Haun;Christian Hoene

  • Affiliations:

  • University of Tübingen, Tübingen, Germany;University of Tübingen, Tübingen, Germany;University of Tübingen, Tübingen, Germany

  • Venue:
  • CCNC'10 Proceedings of the 7th IEEE conference on Consumer communications and networking conference
  • Year:
  • 2010

  • Avatars at a meeting

    Proceedings of the 13th International Conference of the NZ Chapter of the ACM's Special Interest Group on Human-Computer Interaction

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Abstract

In teleconferencing calls it is difficult to identify the current talker, especially if the person is not well known. In addition, if more than one person is talking at the same time, none of them can be understood easily. In real meetings, however, these limitations are not relevant because humans hear spatially. They take advantage of the "cocktail party effect" to distinguish speakers. In this publication, we assess a teleconferencing solution that we call 3D Telephony, which adds a virtual acoustic room simulation to IP based telephony, thereby achieving a spatial audio experience. We have conducted subjective listening tests of a 3D audio rendering engine to study the impact of the participant's locations in a virtual environment on sound quality, understandability and locatability. Our listening test results show some interesting findings. We identified placements, in which listeners find it very easy to locate virtual talkers and in which their success rate in locating two simultaneous virtual talkers is nearly perfect.