Effect of Beacon Sounds on Navigation Performance in a Virtual Reality Environment

Navigating without vision can be quite a daunting task. This study details an auditory interface to deal with this situation and then describes initial validation experiments. Ss were assigned to conditions with differing auditory beacons and assessed on how quickly and efficiently they were able to navigate through a series of virtual environments. The effect of beacon type was explored as well as practice effects due to multiple trials with the interface. The two experiments differed on the size of the beacon capture radius. Results show a main effect of beacon type on performance in the first study and a trend towards significance in the second study. A strong practice effect was also found across all conditions.