Creating an Audio Story with Interactive Binaural Rendering in Virtual Reality

Michele Geronazzo,David Sebastian Eriksen,Miicha Valimaa,Mikkel Brogaard Vittrup,Jeppe Køhlert,Stefania Serafin,Camilla Kirstine Markmann-Hansen,Amalie Rosenkvist

doi:10.1155/2019/1463204

Michele Geronazzo, David Sebastian Eriksen + Show 6 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1155/2019/1463204

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Abstract

The process of listening to an audiobook is usually a rather passive act that does not require an active interaction. If spatial interaction is incorporated into a storytelling scenario, can open. Possibilities of a novel experience which allows an active participation might affect the user-experience. The aim of this paper is to create a portable prototype system based on an embedded hardware platform, allowing listeners to get immersed in an interactive audio storytelling experience enhanced by dynamic binaural audio rendering. For the evaluation of the experience, a short story based on the horror narrative of Stephen King’s Strawberry Springs is adapted and designed in virtual environments. A comparison among three different listening experiences, namely, (i) monophonic (traditional audio story), (ii) static binaural rendering (state-of-the-art audio story), and (iii) our prototype, is conducted. We discuss the quality of the experience based on usability testing, physiological data, emotional assessments, and questionnaires for immersion and spatial presence. Results identify a clear trend for an increase in immersion with our prototype compared to traditional audiobooks, showing also an emphasis on story-specific emotions, i.e., terror and fear.

Highlights

Since 2015, the sale of audiobooks in the United States has expanded by almost 20 percent each year
Evaluation e primary goal of this study is to explore if interactions with auditory virtual reality (VR) contents create a more immersive experience for the user in audiobooks. is means that the prototype has two distinct features: binaural audio rendering and sonic interactions. ese two components should be tested separately in order to identify to which extent they impact the feeling of immersion, leading to three experimental conditions in a between-subject experimental design: (1) Monophonic playback without interactions—common technology in audiobook (MA hereafter)
Questionnaire items 1 and 2 showed differences between conditions monophonic narration (MA) and immersive virtual environment (IVE); item 2 showed a difference between condition binaural recordings (BA) and IVE while item 1 showed a value close to alpha 0.05 between condition BA and IVE. ese results suggested a differentiation of IVE towards a more immersive experience

Summary

Introduction

Since 2015, the sale of audiobooks in the United States has expanded by almost 20 percent each year. A leading distributor and producer in the audiobook eld is the Amazonowned company Audible, which sells and produces spoken audio entertainment, information, and educational programs. In all their titles (more than 10000) Audible produces a year, there has been no signi cant development to the method of storytelling to improve the listening experience. In these traditional audiobooks, there is nothing more than a narrator or actor reading a story aloud, resulting in a passive experience without nonlinear narratives [2]. Before the digitalisation of stories, some of the ways of creating interactive stories was during public readings [13]

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