Acoustical Awareness, Orientation, and Navigation in Rooms

房间内的声学感知、定向和导航

• 批准号: 406277157
• 负责人: Dr. Stephan Ewert, since 8/2021
• 金额: --
• 依托单位: Abteilung Medizinische Physik
• 依托单位国家: 德国
• 项目类别: Research Grants
• 财政年份: 2018
• 资助国家: 德国
• 起止时间: 2017-12-31 至 2022-12-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://gepris.dfg.de/gepris/projekt/406277157?language=en
• 关键词: Acoustical; Awareness; Orientation; Navigation; Rooms

Our awareness of space, and subsequent orientation and navigation in space is dominated by the visual system, relying on the high-resolution topographic representation of space on the retinae of our eyes. Nevertheless, our auditory system can contribute: While the visual field is limited to the viewing direction, spatial hearing is omnidirectional, often guiding head- and eye orientation. While this auditory contribution may be rather small in sighted persons, visually impaired humans are likely to rely much more on auditory cues. An extreme case of the use of auditory cues is reflected by some blind humans’ ability to navigate using echolocation. However, even without emitting dedicated sounds (e.g. mouth clicks for echolocation), humans are able to extract information about their surrounding space from the way external sounds are affected by surfaces and objects, generating early reflections and later reverberation in enclosed spaces.This research proposal is designed to formally quantify the ability of humans to orient in and navigate through space by means of i) combined audio-visual cues, ii) without visual cues but with normal and magnified audio cues, and iii) with only echo-acoustic cues in humans that are trained in echolocation. We will recruit virtual audio-visual environments with speaker arrays or headphones and head-mounted displays for fully controlled (echo)-acoustic and visual cues. From these baseline quantifications we will develop acoustic augmented reality solutions and evaluate their effectiveness in virtual environments aiming to optimize acoustic cues that mediate spatial information.The proposed project strongly benefits from the complementary expertise of the applicants, particularly in the area of room acoustic simulation and signal processing, and echolocation, as well as from the common interest in understanding binaural hearing and its role in challenging real-world situations. The common expertise in psychoacoustics and modelling will, together with the applied virtual reality techniques, allow for delineating auditory-perceptual cues utilized by the subjects. While sharing common techniques and procedures, the complementary work programme proposed for the two labs will focus on virtual acoustics and acoustic augmented reality and reverberation and human echolocation.The project will provide new insights on the extent to which listening to rooms may facilitate visually impaired subjects’ mobility and show which perceptual features are exploited by the subjects. Moreover, the project will provide rehabilitative and assistive acoustic technologies for people with visual impairments.

我们对空间的感知，以及随后的空间定位和导航都是由视觉系统控制的，依赖于我们眼睛视网膜上高分辨率的空间地形图。尽管如此，我们的听觉系统可以做出贡献：虽然视野仅限于观看方向，但空间听觉是全方位的，通常引导头部和眼睛的方向。虽然这种听觉贡献在视力正常的人中可能相当小，但视力受损的人可能更多地依赖于听觉线索。使用听觉线索的一个极端例子是一些盲人使用回声定位导航的能力。然而，即使没有发出专门的声音，（例如，用于回声定位的嘴点击），人类能够从外部声音受到表面和物体影响的方式中提取关于其周围空间的信息，在封闭空间中产生早期反射和后期混响。这项研究提案旨在正式量化人类在空间中定向和导航的能力，方法是i）组合音频-视觉线索，ii）没有视觉线索但具有正常和放大的音频线索，以及iii）在接受回声定位训练的人类中仅具有回声-声学线索。我们将招募虚拟视听环境与扬声器阵列或耳机和头戴式显示器完全控制（回声）-声学和视觉线索。从这些基线量化，我们将开发声学增强现实解决方案，并评估其在虚拟环境中的有效性，旨在优化介导空间信息的声学线索。拟议的项目大大受益于申请人的互补专业知识，特别是在室内声学模拟和信号处理，以及回声定位领域，以及理解双耳听觉及其在具有挑战性的现实世界中的作用的共同兴趣。在心理声学和建模的共同专业知识，将与应用的虚拟现实技术，允许描绘的主题所使用的认知知觉线索。在分享共同技术和程序的同时，两个实验室的互补工作计划将侧重于虚拟声学和声学增强现实以及混响和人类回声定位。该项目将提供新的见解，了解聆听房间可以在多大程度上促进视障受试者的移动性，并显示受试者利用了哪些感知特征。此外，该项目将为视力障碍者提供康复和辅助声学技术。