The effect of spatialization in a data sonification exploration task.

This study presents an exploration task using interactive sonification to compare different sonification mapping concepts. Based on the real application of protein-protein docking within the CoRSAIRe project (« Combinaisons de Rendus Sensori-moteurs pour l'Analyse Immersive de Résultats », or Combination of sensori-motor rendering for the immersive analysis of results), an abstraction of the task was developed which simulates the basic concepts involved. Two conditions were evaluated, the inclusion or absence of spatialized coherent rendering of the sonification output. The position of the sonification was determined by the user’s orientation sensor used for the exploration task. Results showed no significant benefit in the spatialized condition, and for some examples the non-spatialized condition resulted in better performance. This test is the first in a series of studies using this test platform.