Hearing is believing

Abstract

In location-based games, players act as their own avatar within in the physical world. Such games are increasing in popularity due to the wide adoption of smartphones that contain the location sensors necessary for their play. When played on a small, hand-held display, location-based games have two problems: users may be distracted, possibly leading to accidents; and players must map the display contents to the physical world, possibly reducing their sense of immersion. In this paper, we present the results of a study showing that ambient audio - a continuous stream of audio representing an entity in space - can replace visual displays for navigation tasks in location-based games. We find that ambient audio reduces player performance, but increases their sense of immersion in the virtual world and increases player safety.