A Bimodal Navigation System for Pedestrians using Visual and Auditory Displays

Abstract

In this study, we designed and implemented a bimodal navigation system using visual and auditory display. The auditory display gives information about the orientation of a destination to users to enhance their spatial knowledge acquisition. The distinction of this system compared to existing ones is that it uses the moving sound source as the auditory display. To investigate the performance of human sound azimuthal localization using the moving sound source, we tested the sound localization on the horizontal plane using the moving sound source and the stationary one. The results showed that the performance with the moving sound source is more accurate and the difference of the accuracy between the moving sound source and the stationary one is statistically significant.

We evaluated our system in a user study with four participants. Most users gave positive feedbacks on two main features of our system. They favored the auditory cues because it clearly indicated the orientation to the destination. The issue was front-back confusion that had been shown during sound localization. It has to be improved in future works.