AES 5th International Conference on Automotive Audio

Haptic technologies are being increasingly employed as part of automotive sound reproduction systems to enhance listener immersion within the rendered soundfield. Recent research on the use of audio haptic transducers as a means of providing a multi-sensory experience of sound has focused on characterising the performance of transduction devices. To date, performance evaluation has been restricted to experimental conditions in which haptic transducers have been measured individually with specific unit mounting and load conditions. This research demonstrates the validity of extending existing performance evaluation methods and metrics to in situ systems (e.g. those employed in an automotive setting). Specifically, a system of four individual haptic transducers mounted on the backrest of an automotive seat is evaluated, with and without system tuning strategies applied, using accelerometer measurements. Results demonstrate that system response characteristics can be tuned via frequency equalization and input signal dynamics pre-processing with the tuning quantified through use of existing performance metrics. In particular, it is shown that the overall response of the system under test may be optimised through analysis and tuning of each separate transducer individually.