AcouMotion - An Interactive Sonification System for Acoustic
Motion Control
Authors: Thomas Hermann, Oliver Höner and Helge
Ritter
peer reviewed article presented at Gesture
Workshop 2005, Vannes, France
in: Gesture in Human-Computer Interaction and Simulation: 6th
International Gesture Workshop, GW 2005, Berder Island, France, May
18-20, 2005, Revised Selected Papers
Year, S. Gibet and N. Courty and J. Kamp (editors), Series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Volume 3881/2006, pp. 312–323, Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, ISBN 3-540-32624-3, doi
Abstract
This paper introduces
AcouMotion as a new hard-/software system for combining human body
motion, tangible interfaces and sonification to a closed-loop human
computer interface that allows non-visual motor control by using
sonification (non-speech auditory displays) as major feedback channel.
AcouMotion's main components are (i) a sensor device for measuring
motion parameters (ii) a computer simulation to represent the dynamical
evolution of a model world, and (iii) a sonification engine which
generates an auditory representation of objects and any interactions in
the model world. The intended applications of AcouMotion range from new
kinds of sport games that can be played without visual displays and
therefore may be particularly interesting for people with visual
impairment to further applications in data mining, physiotherapy and
cognitive research. The first application of AcouMotion presented in
this paper is Blindminton, a sport game similar to Badminton which is
particularly adapted to the abilities of people with visual impairment.
We describe our current system and its state of development, and we
present first sound examples for interactive sonification using an
early prototype. Finally, we discuss some interesting research
directions based on the fact that AcouMotion binds auditory stimuli and
body motion, and thus can represent a counterpart to the Eye-tracker
device that exploits the binding of visual stimuli and eye-movement in
cognitive research.
Examples
Here we will provide sound examples and interaction video to
demonstrate our current prototype of AcouMotion which is currently
being developed to
enable the sport game Blindminton for people with visual impairment.
This is a video of our current One-player version of Blindminton, which might be called Blindhit.
Sound Synthesis is implemented in SuperCollider.
modified 2007-02-09, Thomas Hermann, thermann (at) techfak.uni-bielefeld.de