Comparing tangible and mid-air interfaces for interacting with a 3D audio controler

Abstract

3D Audio is becoming a new standard in society for music listening and general audio. New applications emerge every day trying to build each time more immersive experiences: videogames, environments simulations, virtual reality… where audio is a crucial part to reach this immersion. The department of Acoustics developed a 24-speakers metal sphere called JAULAB where users can go in and experiment real 3D audio. But we wanted more. Nowadays applications highlight by its user-machine interaction and freedom of action. That’s why, in a collaboration between the Acoustics Lab and UpnaLab, we would like to give users the opportunity to play and interact with the sphere to offer a much more immersive experience that could be used in the future for a great variety of applications (environment simulations, virtual reality, music production, music exhibition…) For this purpose, an implementation of two different interactive interfaces has been developed to be integrated in the sphere. The project has been divided in four different parts: the tangible interface implementation, the mid-air interface implementation, the sphere integration and finally the user study. We will be seeing all this parts during this report.