Effect of multiple auditory localization for multi-participant remote conversation

Supporting effective remote conversation is directly related to effective CSCW. It is often the case that audio is more important than video in remote conversation. Yet most existing remote conversation systems still have simple audio units such as monaural or 2ch stereo output. This is different from face-to-face conversation where different voices come from different locations. Distributed location of multiple voices is considered to make the listening easier but has not been investigated enough. We studied the effects of distributed auditory localization of multiple voices in different locations and in different languages. As a result, it was found that distributed localization is effective in recognizing multiple voices regardless of the languages in both objective and subjective measures.