Weather to Go - A Blended Sonification Application

Presented at the 20th International Conference on Auditory Display (ICAD2014), June 22-25, 2014, New York, NY.People often stay in touch with the weather forecast for various reasons. We depend on knowing the upcoming weather conditions in order to plan activities outside or even just to decide what to wear on our way to work. With weather to go we present an auditory weather report which informs the user about the future or current weather situation when leaving home in the morning or the office in the evening. The sonification is designed to be calm, coherent and expectable so that it can blend well into the user’s familiar environment. In this work the auditory display is activated when somebody leaves through the door. The activity is sensed by a multi-purpose sensor unit mounted at the door. When the door is opened, weather to go renders and plays sounds that characterize the weather forecast for the region where the system is located. That way, the system raises the user’s awareness for suitable clothes, transportation or route to take to the destination in the right moment

Blended Sonification –Sonification For Casual Information Interaction

Presented at the 19th International Conference on Auditory Display (ICAD2013) on July 6-9, 2013 in Lodz, Poland.In recent years, graphical user interfaces have become almost ubiquitous in form of notebooks, smartphones and tablets. These systems normally force the user to attend to an often very specific and narrow screen and thus squeeze the information through a chokepoint. This ties the users’ attention to the device and affects other activities and social interaction. In this paper we introduce Blended Sonifications as sonifications that blend into the users’ environment without confronting users with any explicitly perceived technology. Blended Sonification systems can either be used to display information or to provide ambient communication channels. We present a framework that guides developers towards the identification of suitable information sources and appropriate auditory interfaces. We aim at improving the design of interactions and experiences. Along with the introduction and definition of the framework, this paper presents interface examples, both for mediated communication and information display applications

Upstairs: A calm auditory communication and presence system

Presented at the 21st International Conference on Auditory Display (ICAD2015), July 6-10, 2015, Graz, Styria, Austria.For decades, researchers have been creating and evaluating so-called media spaces. Most of those were virtual spaces that bridge physical distance in order to create a common shared space. In the tradition of these spaces, upstairs supports peripheral awareness between non-colocated spaces but follows a different approach. Instead of creating a large unifying space, it makes use of the metaphor of wall-diffused noises commonly known from neighbors living upstairs or next door. When sharing a space, people are subconsciously aware of other people’s activities, mainly because of their interaction with the environment. We designed upstairs to extend today’s telepresence and social presence systems (i. e. most notably the telephone and videoconferencing solutions) that mostly focus on the transmission of the conscious part of communication and thereby enrich these systems by supporting peripheral awareness to allow for a permanent connection without distracting too much. In this paper we present the design decisions that led to realized system, the technical setup and the study we conducted over a two week time frame in the homes of couples in long distance relationships