SonicVista: Towards Creating Awareness of Distant Scenes through Sonification

Spatial awareness, particularly awareness of distant environmental scenes known as vista-space, is crucial and contributes to the cognitive and aesthetic needs of People with Visual Impairments (PVI). In this work, through a formative study with PVIs, we establish the need for vista-space awareness amongst people with visual impairments, and the possible scenarios where this awareness would be helpful. We investigate the potential of existing sonification techniques as well as AI-based audio generative models to design sounds that can create awareness of vista-space scenes. Our first user study, consisting of a listening test with sighted participants as well as PVIs, suggests that current AI generative models for audio have the potential to produce sounds that are comparable to existing sonification techniques in communicating sonic objects and scenes in terms of their intuitiveness, and learnability. Furthermore, through a wizard-of-oz study with PVIs, we demonstrate the utility of AI-generated sounds as well as scene audio recordings as auditory icons to provide vista-scene awareness, in the contexts of navigation and leisure. This is the first step towards addressing the need for vista-space awareness and experience in PVIs.