AUDITORY ICONS IN LARGE-SCALE COLLABORATIVE ENVIRONMENTS

Abstract

We discuss the potential for auditory icons to address several common problems in large-scale, multiprocessing, and collaborative systems. These problems include those of confirming user-initiated actions, providing information about ongoing processes or system states, providing adequate navigational information, and signalling the existence and activity of other users who may be working in a part of the system that is not visible. We provide several examples of useful auditory icons drawn from a large, shared, multitasking environment called SharedARK, and discuss their implications for other systems.