Tabletop computers (also known as surface computers, smart tables, and
interactive surface computers) have been growing in popularity for the last decade
and are poised to make in-roads into the consumer market, opening up a new
market for the games industry. However, before tabletop computers become widely
accepted, there are open problems that must be addressed with respect to audio
interaction including: "What loudspeaker constellations are appropriate for tabletop
computers?" "How does our perception of spatial sound change with these different
loudspeaker configurations?" and "What panning methods should be used to
maximally use the spatial localization abilities of the user(s)?" Using a custom-built
tabletop computer setup, the work presented in this thesis investigated these three
questions/problems via a series of experiments. The results of these experiments
indicated that accurately localizing a virtual sound source on a horizontal surface is
a difficult and error-prone task, for all of the methods that were used
