4 ms·
I think there is still alot of very interesting and uderexplored territory in the area of audio user interfaces, and I hope there is more interest in this now t
by yummypaint 4y ago
I think there is still alot of very interesting and uderexplored territory in the area of audio user interfaces, and I hope there is more interest in this now that the novelty of screens is finally wearing off.
For example there are spatial audio libraries that can make sounds apparently originate from any location for a user wearing headphones. Why not use that to create a spatial user interface?
Speech-based interfaces are of course very important, but i feel like there could be much faster ways of doing "window management" or diving through standard menus by using synthesized sounds for feedback. This would be attempting to go a step beyond just playing a sample or sound effect, and conveying more detailed information with different aspects of sound texture.
One of the biggest advantages of screens is that they also act like short-term memory. I don't need to remember where I am in a document because the scroll bar holds that information, for example. I feel like it should be possible to do an equivalent thing with audio-only without it becoming overwhelming. Our ears can take in about as much information as our eyes, and we can also "switch focus" and ignore background sounds when not immediately relevant. I don't know of any projects that seriously attempt to do this, unfortunately.
- bee_rider 4y agoI would expect to only be able to position a sound along the 2D left to right line with stereo (although I don't know much about audio processing). Maybe if the head position was tracked? I can't imagine providing much state to the ears constantly, monitors are pretty information rich... but maybe we could get ed in our ears. It is the standard editor...
- bckr 4y agospatial audio makes use of psychoacoustics to make sound a seem to be coming from your front or back as well. basically, your ears/head act as a low pass filter, so a familiar sound with more high end will seem to be coming from more in front of you compared to the same sound with less high end.
- usrusr 4y agoEmphasis on "familiar", it works well if you have a baseline expectation and not at all without.
- boffinism 4y agoTake a look at https://supperware.co.uk/ https://supperware.co.uk/ - head tracking specifically to enable 3D audio.
- bee_rider 4y agoAh, neat. I've been wondering if we had good enough low-latency audio for this sort of thing for a while now...
- pmontra 4y agoI add to "One of the biggest advantages of screens": I could find this comment of yours in seconds instead of having to listen for a long time to all the comments before it. HN would be totally useless except for the list of links in the home page. Anyone using screen readers can prove me wrong, I really do hope I am.
- hobo_mark 4y agoThe Papa Sangre [1] video games had basically no UI and relied only on spatial audio, sadly I never got to try them (Apple pulled them from the appstore when they broke backwards compatibility). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Papa_Sangre https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Papa_Sangre