Sound Localization-Based Navigational User Interfaces

In this paper, we propose and compare three navigational user interfaces that are based on acoustic information. The user can navigate through a Web page or change slides in a presentation by changing its spatial location. To this end, we employ an array of 24 microphones to record speech signals and localize the speaker. The proposed interfaces are: 1) The parallax system, which behaves as if the user is looking out of a window, 2) The corner system, which resizes each image based on the proximity of the speaker to the corners of the environment, and 3) The tiled system, which divides the environment into a number of tiles and loads the image corresponding to the tile on which the user is standing on. A set of experiments were performed on 15 participants, which showed that the interaction time required for the tiled system and the corner system is far less than that required for the parallax system. The participants were also asked to rank the ease of use of each of the interfaces; it was observed that the users are more comfortable with an interface that requires minimal interaction time