Exploration of Sonification Strategies for Guidance in a Blind Driving Game

Abstract

This paper explores the use of continuous auditory display for a dynamic guidance task. Through a driving game with blindfolded players, the success and the efficiency of a lane-keeping task in which no visual feedback is provided is observed. The results highlight the importance of the display information and reveal that a task-related rather than an error-related feedback should be used to enable the driver to finish the circuit. In terms of sound strategies, a first experiment explores the effect of two complex strategies (pitch and modulations) combined with a basic stereo strategy that informs the user about the distance and the direction to the target. The second experiment examines the influence of morphological sound attributes on the performance compared to the use of the spatial sound attributes alone. The results reveal the advantage of using morphological sound attributes for such kinds of applications.