SoundOrbit: motion-correlation interaction with auditory orbital trajectories

SoundOrbit is a novel input technique that uses motion correlation to control smart devices. The technique associates controls with specific orbital sounds, made of cyclically increasing/decreasing musical scales, and the user can activate a control by mimicking the corresponding sound by body motion. Unlike previous movement-correlation techniques based on visual displays, SoundOrbit operates independent of visual perception, enabling the development of cost-effective smart devices that do not require visual displays. We investigated SoundOrbit by conducting two user studies. The first study evaluated the effectiveness of binaural sound spatialization to create a distinct orbiting sound. In comparison to a cyclic musical scale that is fixed in the apparent auditory space, we found that spatial effects did not improve users’ ability to follow the sound orbit. In the second study, we aimed at determining the optimal system parameters, and discovered that users synchronize better with slower speeds. The technique was found to be feasible and reliable for one and two orbits simultaneously, each orbit using a distinct sound timbre, but not for three orbits due to a high error rate.