Increasing pleasantness and security using 3D-sound design in public transport

Abstract

A collaborative project aiming to improve the bus trip with auditory information is presented in this paper. This project took place in Marseille and involved several laboratories from Aix-Marseille University and the Marseille transit operator. This project consists in the study of three fundamental actions of the sound on the bus’ passengers: designing sound announcement to inform passengers of the next stop in a playful and intuitive way, brightening up the route with spatialized soundscapes to increase the trips pleasantness, and using sound to alert passengers of emergency braking. For that purpose, a high quality multi channel sound spatialization system was integrated in the bus and a sonification software based on geolocation was designed. The overall concepts of this project are first presented, then the integration of the sound spatialization system and the implementation of the sonification software are described. Finally, an evaluation method of passengers satisfaction is discussed and first results of a laboratory experiment are presented.