Spatial sound and sound localization on a horizontal surface for use with interactive surface (tabletop) computers

Abstract

Tabletop computers (also known as surface computers, smart tables, and interactive surface computers) have been growing in popularity for the last decade and are poised to make in-roads into the consumer market, opening up a new market for the games industry. However, before tabletop computers become widely accepted, there are open problems that must be addressed with respect to audio interaction including: "What loudspeaker constellations are appropriate for tabletop computers?" "How does our perception of spatial sound change with these different loudspeaker configurations?" and "What panning methods should be used to maximally use the spatial localization abilities of the user(s)?" Using a custom-built tabletop computer setup, the work presented in this thesis investigated these three questions/problems via a series of experiments. The results of these experiments indicated that accurately localizing a virtual sound source on a horizontal surface is a difficult and error-prone task, for all of the methods that were used.