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Interactive exploration of city maps with auditory torches

Published: 28 April 2007 Publication History

Abstract

City maps are an important means to get an impression of the structure of cities. They represent visual abstraction of urban areas with different geographic entities, their locations, and spatial relations. However, this information is not sufficiently accessible today to blind and visually impaired people. To provide a non-visual access to map information, we developed an interactive auditory city map, which uses 3D non-speech sound to convey the position, shape, and type of geographic objects. For the interactive exploration of the auditory map, we designed a virtual walk-through. This allows the user to gain an overview of an area. To be able to focus on certain regions of the map, we equip the user with an auditory torch. With the auditory torch users can change the number of displayed objects in a self directed way. To further aid in getting a global idea of the displayed area we additionally introduce a bird's eye view on the auditory map. Our evaluation shows that our approaches enable the user to gain an understanding of the explored environment.

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Iglesias, R., Casado, S., Gutierrez, T., Barbero, J., Avizzano, C., Marcheschi, S., and Bergamasco, M, Computer graphics access for blind people through a haptic and audio virtual environment. In Proc. HAVE 2004, 13--18.
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Zhao, H., Smith, B. K., Norman, K., Plaisant, C., and Shneiderman, B., Interactive sonification of choropleth maps. IEEE MultiMedia, 12(2), 2005, 26--35.
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Heuten, W., Wichmann, D., and Boll, S., Interactive 3D Sonification for the Exploration of City Maps. In Proc. NordiCHI 2006, 155--164.
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cover image ACM Conferences
CHI EA '07: CHI '07 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems
April 2007
1286 pages
ISBN:9781595936424
DOI:10.1145/1240866
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 28 April 2007

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Author Tags

  1. 3D sound
  2. auditory display
  3. city maps
  4. exploration
  5. interaction techniques
  6. orientation
  7. sonification

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CHI07
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CHI EA '07 Paper Acceptance Rate 212 of 582 submissions, 36%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 6,164 of 23,696 submissions, 26%

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