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SoundModVR: Sound Modifications in Virtual Reality for Sound Accessibility

Published: 13 October 2024 Publication History

Abstract

Previous VR sound accessibility work have substituted sounds with visual or haptic output to increase VR accessibility for deaf and hard of hearing (DHH) people. However, deafness occurs on a spectrum, and many DHH people (e.g., those with partial hearing) can also benefit from manipulating audio (e.g., increasing volume at specific frequencies) instead of substituting it with another modality. In this demo paper, we present a toolkit that allows modifying sounds in VR to support DHH people. We designed and implemented 18 VR sound modification tools spanning four categories, including prioritizing sounds, modifying sound parameters, providing spatial assistance, and adding additional sounds. Evaluation of our tools with 10 DHH users across five diverse VR scenarios reveal that our toolkit can improve DHH users’ VR experience but could be further improved by providing more customization options and decreasing cognitive load. We then compiled a Unity toolkit and conducted a preliminary evaluation with six Unity VR developers. Preliminary insights show that our toolkit is easy to use but could be enhanced through modularization.

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References

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cover image ACM Conferences
UIST Adjunct '24: Adjunct Proceedings of the 37th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology
October 2024
394 pages
ISBN:9798400707186
DOI:10.1145/3672539
Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all 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 third-party components of this work must be honored. For all other uses, contact the Owner/Author.

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Published: 13 October 2024

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Author Tags

  1. Accessibility
  2. customization
  3. deaf and hard of hearing
  4. sound
  5. virtual reality

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Overall Acceptance Rate 355 of 1,733 submissions, 20%

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The 38th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology
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