Reproducible sonification for virtual navigation

The use of sonification for navigation, localization and obstacle avoidance is considered to be one of the most important tasks in auditory display research for its potential application to navigation systems in vehicles and smartphones, assistive technology and other eyes-free applications. The aim of this technology is to deliver location-based information to support navigation through sound. In this paper a comparison of two sonification methods for navigation and obstacle avoidance is presented. These methods were initially developed during a sonification hack day that was ran during the Interactive Sonification (ISon) workshop 2013. In order to allow the formal comparison of methods, we followed a reproducible sonification approach using a set of guidelines provided by SonEX (Sonification Evaluation eXchange). SonEX is a community-based environment that enables the definition and evaluation of standardized tasks, supporting open science standards and reproducible research. In order to allow for reproducible research, the system has been made publicly available.