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Abstract: Symbolic representations of exclude and include for audio
sources and sinks: Figurative suggestions of mute/solo & cue
and deafen/confide & harken
Michael Cohen and Jens Herder. Symbolic representations of exclude
and include for audio sources and sinks: Figurative suggestions of
mute/solo & cue and deafen/confide & harken, Virtual
Environments 98, Stuttgart, pp. 59/1-4, June 1998.
Shared virtual environments
require generalized control of user-dependent media streams.
Traditional audio mixing idioms for enabling and disabling various sources
employ mute and solo functions, which, along with cue, selectively
disable or focus on respective channels. Exocentric interfaces
which explicitly model not only spatial audio sources, but also location,
orientation, directivity, and multiplicity of sinks, motivate the
generalization of mute/solo & cue to exclude and include, manifested
for sinks as deafen/confide &
harken, a narrowing of stimuli by
explicitly blocking out and/or concentrating on selected entities.
This paper introduces figurative representations of these functions,
virtual hands to be clasped over avatars' ears and mouths,
with orientation suggesting the agent of the blocking.
Applications include groupware for collaboration and teaching,
teleconferencing and
chat spaces, and authoring and manipulation of distributed virtual
environments.
Keywords:
CSCW (computer-supported collaborative work), groupware, narrowcasting
functions, articulated mixing console
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