Human Interaction in 3D Manipulations : Can sonification improve the performance of the interaction?

Abstract: In this report the effects of using sonification when performing move- ments in 3D space are explored. User studies were performed where partic- ipants had to repeatedly move their hand toward a target. Three different sonification modes were tested where the fundamental frequency, sound level and sound rate were varied respectively depending on the distance to the target. The results show that there is no statistically significant performance increase for any sonification mode. There is however an in- dication that sonification increases the interaction speed for some users. The mode which provided the greatest average performance increase was when the sound level was varied. This mode gave a 7% average speed increase over the silent control mode. However, the sound level mode has some significant drawbacks, especially the very high base volume re- quirement, which might not make it the best suited sonification mode for all applications. In the general case we instead recommend using the sonification mode that varies the sound rate, which gave a slightly lower performance gain but can be played at a lower volume due to its binary nature.