Providing ambient information as comfortable sound for reducing cognitive overload

Everyday, we receive large amounts of information through our various senses. Since the majority of information is perceived through eye sight, other senses are often left unutilized. As a result, in order to utilize disengaged senses in our daily interactions, especially auditory, we propose a method to extract and transform real-world's visual information to auditory information. Our method is based on converting a real-world's objects' location and distance attributes to sound attributes, which are later be combined to form music. To verify our approach, we developed a prototype that we called Music Sonar, with which we carried out a preliminary user study followed by a questionnaire. The objective of Music Sonar is to reduce the cognitive overload due to visual information by converting visual feedback to ambient auditory feedback, allowing us to use our visual attention for more essential tasks. The user study results confirmed general validity of our approach, despite some shortcomings. Participants also provided a number of usability and interactivity related insights regarding the music based feedback. Finally, we provided our future direction of this research project.