Soundmarks in Spoken Route Guidance

Route guidance is an emerging mobile computing application domain. Soundscapes or acoustic environments are a perceptually important part of people's location awareness and navigation. In this paper, we present how non-speech audio can be used to complement speech-based and graphical route information in mobile public transport guidance. We present TravelMan, a mobile multimodal pedestrian and public transport route guidance application. Based on TravelMan, we also present a soundmark-based route description design. Auditory icons describe methods of transport and identify spatial points of interest. They support users as a less intrusive, awareness supporting information source. Initial test results indicate that combining speech and non-speech sounds are not a trivial task, and that there is need for further development. [