A Proposal of an Auditory Interface for the Virtual Three-Dimensional Space

摘要

Information systems have been widely been used due to a combined effect of the information infrastructure and the convenience of the information systems. Increase in the number of people who cannot benefit from these systems (e.g., disabled People) has been a social problem. This paper proposes a system which has auditory input and output, so that visually handicapped people or visually unusable sys- tems can be improved. The proposed system has an input interface using a five-degree-of freedom nonlanguage voice (previously developed by the authors), and an output of three-dimensional sound. The proposed system was de- signed, constructed, and evaluated for example by measur- ing the speed of users’selection of the output of the system. Unlike visual communications, generally an auditory inter- face can hardly communicate multiple data at a time. Con- sidering this point, the proposed system shows relatively good characteristics. It will be possible to apply the system to “virtual reality,” notably an interface in a three-dimensional acoustic space.