Designing an interaction technique using spatial sound for remote guidance in 360-degree video call

Abstract

Recently, mobile video communications have been increasingly being used. However, video calls can only share part of the participants' information, not share the participants' full physical information. This information loss makes unclearness to video call users when communicating with deictic words such as here or there. It is also challenging to discover precisely where the other person is pointing beyond the video with 360-degree video calls. This study proposes interaction using spatial sound to reduce the frustration on matching field-of-view between participants in a 360-degree video call. A formative study was conducted for designing spatial auditory cues for video communication to determine between four different types of sounds: speech, non-speech, continuous, and non-continuous. The result shows that the resolution of speech and non-speech spatial sound is similar. Two spatial auditory cues were designed for a 360-degree video call system. This interaction technique, which uses spatial sound, was evaluated in the in-lab environment for matching views between two 360-degree video call participants.