Sound Design and Prototyping

Bedersen's system is one-way. It does not send information from the user to the environment such as the identity, location, or history of the particular user. Other investigations into lightweight interaction include Hudson [5] who demonstrated providing iconic auditory summaries of newly arrived email when a user flashes a colored card while walking by a sensor. This system still required active input from the user and only explored one use of audio in contrast to creating an additional auditory environment that does not require user input. We are currently exploring providing a range of information with Audio Aura: Employees at PARC can use the system to augment their physical environment with information about their colleagues. For example, they can hear a greeting at the entryway to the office of a colleague who is out for the day. Audio Aura can also create an iconic summary of a person's recent activity (also at the entryway to their office), perhaps indicating that they had left just a few minutes earlier. The audio content can also reflect the history of the person wearing the device. Following the previous example, if I again passed a colleague's office, the summary of their activity might only reflect the time since my last visit. Since Audio Aura knows the identity of the user, the system can deliver personalized information such as a summary of newly arrived email messages while pouring coffee in the break room or hearing a reminder for a meeting that is about to start. Various artifacts can trigger auditory cues; for example, standing near a bookshelf may trigger a message about recent acquisitions. The longer a user lingers, the more detail s/he receives. Because we intend this system for lightweight interaction, the design of the auditory cues must avoid the " alarm " paradigm so frequently found in computational environments. One method we are exploring is imbedding cues into a running. low-level soundtrack, so that the user is not startled by the sudden impingement of clearly artificial sound. We also combine sound effects, music, and voice into a rich, multi-layered environment which allows behavioral complexity. For example, because speech tends to carry foreground information, it may not be heard unless the user lingers in a location for more than a few seconds. Mapping Audio Aura's complex matrix of system behaviors to a multi-layered sound design has been aided by prototyping it in VRML 2.0, …