Rendering visual events as sounds: spatial attention capture by auditory augmented reality
Date
2017
Authors
Stone, Scott A.
Tata, Matthew S.
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Public Library of Science
Abstract
Many salient visual events tend to coincide with auditory events, such as seeing and hearing a car pass by. Information from the visual and auditory senses can be used to create a stable percept of the stimulus. Having access to related coincident visual and auditory information can help for spatial tasks such as localization. However not all visual information has analogous auditory percepts, such as viewing a computer monitor. Here, we describe a system capable of detecting and augmenting visual salient events into localizable auditory events. The system uses a neuromorphic camera (DAVIS 240B) to detect logarithmic changes of brightness intensity in the scene, which can be interpreted as salient visual events. Participants were blindfolded and asked to use the device to detect new objects in the scene, as well as determine direction of motion for a moving visual object. Results suggest the system is robust enough to allow for the simple detection of new salient stimuli, as well accurately encoding direction of visual motion. Future successes are probable as neuromorphic devices are likely to become faster and smaller in the future, making this system much more feasible
Description
This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License
Keywords
Visual events , Auditory events , Sensory events , Spatial information , Neuromorphic , Sounds
Citation
Stone, S. A., & Tata, M. S. (2017). Rendering visual events as sounds: Spatial attention capture by auditory augmented reality. PLoS ONE, 12(8), e0182635. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0182635