Title
A Taxonomy of Sounds in Virtual Reality
Abstract
Virtual reality (VR) leverages human sight, hearing and touch senses to convey virtual experiences. For d/Deaf and hard of hearing (DHH) people, information conveyed through sound may not be accessible. To help with future design of accessible VR sound representations for DHH users, this paper contributes a consistent language and structure for representing sounds in VR. Using two studies, we report on the design and evaluation of a novel taxonomy for VR sounds. Study 1 included interviews with 10 VR sound designers to develop our taxonomy along two dimensions: sound source and intent. To evaluate this taxonomy, we conducted another study (Study 2) where eight HCI researchers used our taxonomy to document sounds in 33 VR apps. We found that our taxonomy was able to successfully categorize nearly all sounds (265/267) in these apps. We also uncovered additional insights for designing accessible visual and haptic-based sound substitutes for DHH users.
Year
DOI
Venue
2021
10.1145/3461778.3462106
PROCEEDINGS OF THE 2021 ACM DESIGNING INTERACTIVE SYSTEMS CONFERENCE (DIS 2021)
Keywords
DocType
Citations 
accessibility, virtual reality, deaf, Deaf, hard of hearing, taxonomy, sound awareness, audio engineering, sound design
Conference
0
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.34
0
8
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Dhruv Jain1449.62
Sasa Junuzovic200.34
Eyal Ofek31865106.07
Mike Sinclair476476.87
John Porter500.34
Chris Yoon600.34
Swetha Machanavajhala700.34
Meredith Ringel Morris85465362.85