Instituto de Telecomunicaciones y Aplicaciones Multimedia (ITEAM)
Abstract
[EN] The use of mobile telephony, along with the widespread
of smartphones in the consumer market, is gradually displacing
traditional telephony. Fixed-line telephone conference
calls have been widely employed for carrying out
distributed meetings around the world in the last decades.
However, the powerful characteristics brought by
modern mobile devices and data networks allow for new
conferencing schemes based on immersive communication,
one the fields having major commercial and technical
interest within the telecommunications industry today.
In this context, adding spatial audio features into conventional
conferencing systems is a natural way of creating
a realistic communication environment. In fact, the
human auditory system takes advantage of spatial audio
cues to locate, separate and understand multiple speakers
when they talk simultaneously. As a result, speech
intelligibility is significantly improved if the speakers are
simulated to be spatially distributed. This paper describes
the development of a new immersive multi-party conference
call service for mobile devices (smartphones and
tablets) that substantially improves the identification and
intelligibility of the participants. Headphone-based audio
reproduction and binaural sound processing algorithms
allow the user to locate the different speakers within a
virtual meeting room. Moreover, the use of a large touch
screen helps the user to identify and remember the participants
taking part in the conference, with the possibility
of changing their spatial location in an interactive
way.This work has been partially supported by the government of Spain grant TEC-2009-14414-C03-01 and by the new technologies department of TelefónicaAguilera Martí, E.; López Monfort, JJ.; Cobos Serrano, M.; Macià Pina, L.; Martí Guerola, A. (2012). An Immersive Multi-Party Conferencing System for Mobile Devices Using 3D Binaural Audio. Waves. 4:5-14. http://hdl.handle.net/10251/57918S514
