Designing, Prototyping and Testing of $360^{\circ}$ Spatial Audio Conferencing for Virtual Tours

In this paper, we describe the process of designing, prototyping and testing spatial audio interfaces for supporting communication between people viewing $360^{\circ}$ images during a virtual tour. When several people are viewing the same $360^{\circ}$ image in Virtual Reality (VR) headsets and sharing live audio, it can be difficult to understand them when they are talking at the same time. However, spatial audio could be used to clearly disambiguate between the different speakers. We introduce the concept of Attention-Based Spatial Audio; playing spatial audio from the direction where the speaker is paying attention to. Results indicate statistically significant difference between Attention-Based Spatial Audio and standard spatial audio in terms of cognitive load, social presence, and vocal intelligibility.