Sound Zone Control in an Interactive Table System Environment

Tabletop interaction systems have been explored actively owing to their advantages of allowing participants to collaborate each other by, in many cases, multi-touch gestures over a single, shared display. However, less research has been done on the exploration of localized auditory feedback. The authors have been investigating an interactive table system that is capable of presenting visual and auditory feedback, as well as gestural input. Especially, as for the auditory feedback, the system can locate multiple sounds simultaneously by controlling the loudness for 16 speakers mounted in the table. In this paper, we describe the design and experimental analysis of sound zone control, aiming to enhance the presence of sounds and interaction among participants in the interactive table environment. User studies indicate that the sound zone can be broadened when a source signal is accompanied by different delayed signals of it, while time intervals for sound position exchange over multiple speakers are not of primary importance in perception.