Symbolic representations of exclude and include for audio sources and sinks: figurative suggestions of mute/solo cue and deafen/confide harken

摘要

Shared virtual environments require generalized control of user-dependent media streams. Traditional audio mixing idioms for enabling and disabiling various sources employ mute and solo functions, which, along with cue, selectively disable or focus on respective channels. Exocentric interfaces which explicitly model not only spatial audio sources, but also location, orientation, directivity, and multiplicity of sinks, motivate the generalization of mute/solo & cue to exclude and include, manifested for sinks as deafen/confide & harken, a narrowing of stimuli by explicitly blocking out and/or concentrating on selected entities. This paper introduces figurative representations of these functions, virtual hands to be clasped over avatars' ears and mouths, with orientation suggesting the nature of the blocking. Applications include groupware for collaboration and teaching, teleconferencing and chat spaces, and authoring and manipulation of distributed virtual environments.