Schrödinger’s box: an artifact to study the limits of plausibility in auditory augmentations

Abstract

For every physical interaction with our environment, we have some expectations concerning the resulting sound. As these expectations are quite rough, the auditory feedback can be modulated to convey additional information, without restricting the object’s original purpose. Such auditory augmentation is calm and unobtrusive as long it stays plausible with respect to the performed action. The plausibility range defines a hard limit for the information capacity of the auditory display. In order to maximize the information capacity of auditory augmentations, an estimate of the plausibility range of augmented auditory feedback is required. Here we present Schrödinger’s box, a mobile hardware- and software-platform that is designed for exploring the limits of plausibility of auditory feedback for unknown sounding objects. It renders augmented auditory feedback for its one and only affordance: striking it with a mallet. While hiding all electronics from the users, it meets the extreme requirements of latency that are necessary so that the original auditory feedback is effectively masked by the synthetic auditory feedback. With Schrödinger’s box, we now have a valuable research tool, not only for optimizing auditory augmentations, but also for investigating the plausibility of auditory feedback in general.