Audio Personas: Augmenting Social Perception via Body-Anchored Audio Cues

2025-05-02

AI Summary

This study addresses the limited social awareness in audio augmented reality (AAR) by introducing the concept of “audio persona”: dynamically rendering body-anchored, personalized environmental sounds in real time via headphones, thereby establishing audition as a novel social modality for expressing emotion, personality, and interpersonal boundaries in face-to-face interaction. Methodologically, we developed a wearable prototype integrating multi-user spatial tracking, ultra-low-latency audio streaming, and head-pose calibration—enabling, for the first time, environmental sound to function as a dynamic auditory identity marker. Our contribution extends AAR’s social perception capabilities and fills a critical gap in audio-driven identity expression research. A preregistered experiment (N = 64) demonstrated that positive audio personas significantly increased perceived social attractiveness and likability while reducing perceived threat.

Technology Category

• Cognitive Modeling & Cognitive Systems: Social Cognition And Interaction
• Humans and AI: Game Design — Virtual Humans, NPCs and Autonomous Characters
• Application Domains: Humanities & Computational Social Science

Application Category

• User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: Accountability, Transparency, and Ethics for personalization
• Search and Retrieval-Augmented AI: Personalized, context-aware and across-device search
• Responsible Web: Machine-in-the-loop, human agency and autonomy

Abstract

We introduce Audio Personas, enabling users to"decorate"themselves with body-anchored sounds in audio augmented reality. Like outfits, makeup, and fragrances, audio personas offer an alternative yet dynamic channel to augment face-to-face interactions. For instance, one can set their audio persona as rain sounds to reflect a bad mood, bee sounds to establish personal boundaries, or a playful"woosh"sound to mimic passing by someone like a breeze. To instantiate the concept, we implemented a headphone-based prototype with multi-user tracking and audio streaming. Our formative study with designers revealed that audio personas were preferred in public and semi-public-private spaces for managing social impressions (e.g., personality) and signaling current states (e.g., emotions). Our preregistered in-lab study with 64 participants showed that audio personas influenced how participants formed impressions. Individuals with positive audio personas were rated as more socially attractive, more likable, and less threatening than those with negative audio personas.

Problem

• Enhancing social perception via body-anchored audio cues
• Augmenting face-to-face interactions with dynamic sound personas
• Influencing social impressions and emotional signaling through audio

Innovation

• Body-anchored audio cues for social perception
• Headphone-based prototype with multi-user tracking
• Dynamic audio personas to manage social impressions