Soundly Located: Programmable Sounds to Assist Localization in Visual Impaired Sport

The Interactive Ball (“I-Ball”) is a programmable tonal soccer ball equipped with a speaker and microphone. Compared to rattle or beeper-based tonal balls, it allows for arbitrary and sensor-adaptive outputs. As a sporting aid for low-vision, this makes participation in team sports more accessible. By being programmable, the participation can be tailored to the individual. It then begs the question of “what tone to play?” This paper presents an exploitative evaluation of tone bandwidth (i.e., a narrow-band “ping” or a broad-band “rustle” sound) and tone volume (quiet to load) in environments with increasing with levels of white background noise with a focus on the ball (source) localization. This was evaluated with blindfolded subjects in an acoustic source localization task (audible angle perception). Initial show that while the narrow-band tone had better (more accurate angle localization) performance in some select cases, the broad-band “rustle” sound had better performance in general, especially in high noise, which is in keeping with a cross-correlation mechanism for localization. Output levels are more nuanced than direct signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) maximization. They show that louder sounds (higher SNR) is not always better and similarly more noise (lower SNR) is not always worse. This suggests that to aid interaction, that the nature of the tones generated by an interactive aid should factor external factors so as to better aid perceptual localization performance.