Hi, my name is Loïc Rosset.
In this presentation of 5 minutes, I will explain you the main content of our Late Breaking
Work.
First, I will introduce you the problem we aimed to solve.
In march 2020, Barco.com estimated that 1 out of 4 meetings were hybrid.
A hybrid meeting is a mixture of in-person and remote attendees.
In this presentation I will refer to the in-person attendees as co-located conferees and the
remote attendees as remote conferees.
So, with the pandemic, hybrid meetings are becoming ubiquitous and a study of IBM revealed
that half of the adults in the U.S would like home to remain their primary work place, which
will further increase the number of hybrid meetings.
However there is one problem with hybrid meetings.
Sometimes, the remote conferee has difficulty to identify who is speaking among the co-located
conferees.
This create assymetries in the interaction.
It is not a new problem, it was already seen in the first video-conferencing systems such
as the media space in mid-1980s.
So we propose to use Binaural Audio to solve this problem.
Binaural audio reflects the way you are listening to things in real life, basically, your ears
your head and torso act as a filter on the sound that is coming to you and it allows
you to identify sound around you.
We are able to recreate this with head-related transfer functions, but this only works with
headphones or earphones.
So in our work, we wanted to answer 5 different research questions.
First, does binaural audio have an effect on the general comprehension, the feeling
of presence, the memory or the user experience of remote conferees.
We also wanted to see if there was an effect on the experience of the remote conferees
when the co-located conferees were wearing face masks.
To answer these questions, we designed a user experience that I will now describe to you.
First we recorded 6 different conferences.
For this purpose, we recruited 3 actors who played the role of the co-located conferees.
3 conferences where recorded with masks and 3 without masks.
The recording had either a mono audio format, a binaural audio or a binaural audio with
head rotations.
The latter is a post-processed version of the binaural audio such that each time a left
or right conferee was talking, the audio was rotated such that after a short time, the
audio came from the front direction, thus simulating a head rotation.
Indeed, in real life, when you hear someone talk on your left or your right, you would
have a tendency to look at this person and thus the audio rotates towards your front.
In the study, the participants first had to make a hearing check then give their personal
information.
Then, they watched the videos of the conferences one by one.
After each video they took a memory test, consisting of 6 statements to be linked to
the correct conferee and a comprehension test consisting of 3 multiple choice questions
on the content of the discussion.
They had then to rate their confidence towards their answers both for the memory and comprehension
tests, and also answer a questionnaire consisting of 5 Likert type questions to rate the speaker
identification difficulty, overall comprehension difficulty, concentration needed, feeling
of presence and the audio helpfulness.
A final questionnaire was presented at the end of the experiment to get a feedback on
the binaural audio.
42 persons, mainly students, participated as remote conferees by watching our 6 videos,
balanced in a Latin square design.
We also used a within-group design to reduce individual differences on memory and attention.
I will now present you the obtained answers to our research questions.
The results demonstrate that there is a significant increase in the comprehension score of the
remote conferees in the visual condition without mask by using binaural audio compared to mono
and that there is an increase in the comprehension confidence with the binaural-with-head-rotation
audio format.
With face masks, only a significant increase of the comprehension score could be observed
with the binaural-with-head-rotation format compared to binaural and mono.
No significant differences were observed for the feeling of presence or the memory of the
remote conferees.
For the user experience, no significant differences were observed between the binaural formats
and mono.
However, the end-experiment questionnaire allowed us to get feedback from the participants
concerning the binaural audio.
The results indicate that binaural audio is perceived as helpful but also somewhat distractive.
This could be because of the unfamiliarity of the participants with this type of audio
or the required cognitive load Concerning the effects of masks, without them,
the results indicate an easier speaker identification and with them a higher concentration needed.
In conclusion we showed that binaural audio can support remote participants in hybrid
meetings mainly in term of comprehension and confidence of comprehension.
Thank you for your attention.