New virtual reality technologies enable us to produce a spatialized kind of sound over headphones, called 3D sound. The advantages of these capabilities prompted us to produce some kind of virtual aural environment in order to generate a user interface to be used with information systems for visually impaired people. But nice sounds floating in the space do not provide a usable and friendly information system. Several studies talk about the use of 3D sound , but very few deal with models and metaphors to exploit these capabilities. The basic architecture consists of a direct graph of nodes and links.
Nodes represent certain documents.
Links reflect semantic relationships between documents. Usually links can be displayed both explicitly, as a menu of choices on the screen, or implicitly, as an action taken when the user does something to an identifiable target object in the interface. We adapt the conventional hypermedial model to fit our needs. Each node belongs to some type that reflects the kind of information contained. Each type of node is mapped to a speaker in a determined position in the space.