The Vocal Village: Enhancing Collaboration with Spatialized Audioconferencing

Traditional methods of voice communication fail to adequately address the needs of users engaged in remote collaborative activities. While some emerging technologies offer greater support for these activities, they often do so at a considerable price, making them unsuitable solutions for widespread usage. To address this demand, we have developed the Vocal Village, an enhanced audioconferencing application that uses VoIP technology to join members of distributed collaborative groups in immersive and personalizable spatialized audio environments. This paper describes the Vocal Village system and also presents the findings of a preliminary study, in which it was determined that the methods of personalizable spatialization used within the Vocal Village significantly improved participants’ subjective measures of audioconference performance.