Already It Was Hard to Tell Who’s Speaking Over There, and Now Face Masks! Can Binaural Audio Help Remote Participation in Hybrid Meetings?
Loïc Rosset, Hamed S. Alavi, Sailin Zhong, Denis Lalanne
Abstract
In the context of office-work meetings, it has become a norm that one or more participants attend remotely while others are in the (physical) meeting room–the social situation that has been studied as “hybrid meetings’’. We examine whether incorporating the direction of sound in the audio can support the remote attendees to recognize more clearly who is speaking in the meeting room and eventually improve the experience of attending a hybrid meeting. We present the results of a user study, in which 42 participants followed six different discussions recorded in a meeting room, in six conditions: three audio formats are examined, once in a situation where the co-located conferees wore a face-mask and once without a mask. The results demonstrate that the binaural audio can support remote participation, especially in terms of general comprehension and confidence of comprehension, with higher effect for the face-mask conditions.