Diary in the Sky: A Spatial Audio Display for a Mobile Calendar

Abstract

We present a spatial audio display technique that overcomes the presentation rate bottleneck of traditional monaural audio displays. Our compact speech display works by encoding message semantics into the acoustic spatialisation. In user testing, this display facilitated better recall of events than a conventional small screen visual display. Moreover, results showed that this mapping aided in the recall of the absolute position of events — as opposed to merely their relative orders — in a temporally ordered data set.