Soundmarks in Spoken Route Guidance
Anssi Kainulainen, Markku Turunen, Jaakko Hakulinen, Aleksi Melto · 2007
Route guidance is an emerging mobile computing application domain. Soundscapes or acoustic environments are a perceptually important part of people's location awareness and navigation. In this paper, we present how nonspeech audio can be used to complement speechbased and graphical route information in mobile public transport guidance. We present TravelMan, a mobile multimodal pedestrian and public transport route guidance application. Based on TravelMan, we also present a soundmarkbased route description design. Auditory icons describe methods of transport and identify spatial points of interest. They support users as a less intrusive, awareness supporting information source. Initial test results indicate that combining speech and nonspeech sounds are not a trivial task, and that there is need for further development.