Spatially augmented audio delivery: applications of spatial sound awareness in sensor-equipped indoor environments

Current mainstream audio playback paradigms do not take any account of a user's physical location or orientation in the delivery of audio through headphones or speakers. Thus audio is usually presented as a static perception whereby it is naturally a dynamic 3D phenomenon audio environment. It fails to take advantage of our innate psycho-acoustical perception that we have of sound source locations around us. Described in this paper is an operational platform which we have built to augment the sound from a generic set of wireless headphones. We do this in a way that overcomes the spatial awareness limitation of audio playback in indoor 3D environments which are both location-aware and sensor-equipped. This platform provides access to an audio-spatial presentation modality which by its nature lends itself to numerous cross-dissiplinary applications. In the paper we present the platform and two demonstration applications.