Auptimize: Optimal Placement of Spatial Audio Cues for Extended Reality

TL;DR

Auptimize is a computational method that optimizes spatial audio source placement in XR to improve user localization accuracy by leveraging the ventriloquist effect, enhancing interface efficiency.

Contribution

It introduces a novel approach for placing XR sound sources that reduces localization errors by disentangling sound source locations from visual elements.

Findings

Auptimize reduces spatial audio source identification errors.

The method improves unambiguous sound cue recognition.

It is applicable across diverse XR scenarios.

Abstract

Spatial audio in Extended Reality (XR) provides users with better awareness of where virtual elements are placed, and efficiently guides them to events such as notifications, system alerts from different windows, or approaching avatars. Humans, however, are inaccurate in localizing sound cues, especially with multiple sources due to limitations in human auditory perception such as angular discrimination error and front-back confusion. This decreases the efficiency of XR interfaces because users misidentify from which XR element a sound is coming. To address this, we propose Auptimize, a novel computational approach for placing XR sound sources, which mitigates such localization errors by utilizing the ventriloquist effect. Auptimize disentangles the sound source locations from the visual elements and relocates the sound sources to optimal positions for unambiguous identification of sound cues, avoiding errors due to inter-source proximity and front-back confusion. Our evaluation shows that Auptimize decreases spatial audio-based source identification errors compared to playing sound cues at the paired visual-sound locations. We demonstrate the applicability of Auptimize for diverse spatial audio-based interactive XR scenarios.