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Already It Was Hard to Tell Who’s Speaking Over There, and Now Face Masks! Can Binaural Audio Help Remote Participation in Hybrid Meetings?

Published: 08 May 2021 Publication History

Abstract

In the context of office-work meetings, it has become a norm that one or more participants attend remotely while others are in the (physical) meeting room–the social situation that has been studied as “hybrid meetings’’. We examine whether incorporating the direction of sound in the audio can support the remote attendees to recognize more clearly who is speaking in the meeting room and eventually improve the experience of attending a hybrid meeting. We present the results of a user study, in which 42 participants followed six different discussions recorded in a meeting room, in six conditions: three audio formats are examined, once in a situation where the co-located conferees wore a face-mask and once without a mask. The results demonstrate that the binaural audio can support remote participation, especially in terms of general comprehension and confidence of comprehension, with higher effect for the face-mask conditions.

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  • (2023)Hear We Are: Spatial Audio Benefits Perceptions of Turn-Taking and Social Presence in Video MeetingsProceedings of the 2nd Annual Meeting of the Symposium on Human-Computer Interaction for Work10.1145/3596671.3598578(1-10)Online publication date: 13-Jun-2023
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cover image ACM Conferences
CHI EA '21: Extended Abstracts of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
May 2021
2965 pages
ISBN:9781450380959
DOI:10.1145/3411763
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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Published: 08 May 2021

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  1. Binaural Sound
  2. Home-Office
  3. Hybrid Meeting
  4. Video-Conferencing

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  • (2024)There Is More to Avatars Than Visuals: Investigating Combinations of Visual and Auditory User Representations for Remote Collaboration in Augmented RealityProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/36981488:ISS(540-568)Online publication date: 24-Oct-2024
  • (2024)Evaluating the Effect of Binaural Auralization on Audiovisual Plausibility and Communication Behavior in Virtual Reality2024 IEEE Conference Virtual Reality and 3D User Interfaces (VR)10.1109/VR58804.2024.00104(849-858)Online publication date: 16-Mar-2024
  • (2023)Hear We Are: Spatial Audio Benefits Perceptions of Turn-Taking and Social Presence in Video MeetingsProceedings of the 2nd Annual Meeting of the Symposium on Human-Computer Interaction for Work10.1145/3596671.3598578(1-10)Online publication date: 13-Jun-2023
  • (2023)Leveraging Nonverbal Communication for Intelligent Virtual Meeting InterfacesCompanion Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces10.1145/3581754.3584110(226-228)Online publication date: 27-Mar-2023
  • (2023)Pair Programming Practiced in Hybrid Work2023 ACM/IEEE International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement (ESEM)10.1109/ESEM56168.2023.10304797(1-7)Online publication date: 26-Oct-2023
  • (2023)Meet me in VR! Can VR space help remote teams connectInternational Journal of Human-Computer Studies10.1016/j.ijhcs.2023.103104179:COnline publication date: 1-Nov-2023
  • (2022)Exploring Embodied Gestures and Video Filters for More Expressive Virtual Group Meeting InteractionsProceedings of the Sixteenth International Conference on Tangible, Embedded, and Embodied Interaction10.1145/3490149.3503583(1-4)Online publication date: 13-Feb-2022

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