The provision of audio augmented reality (AAR) experiences is becoming more widespread.In this study, to investigate the influence of device design on AAR experience from the perspective of acoustic transparency, physical and subjective evaluations were conducted using five devices with different shapes and transparency modes.In the subjective evaluation, perceived transparency, impressions of real-world sound, and subjective impressions of AAR experience when wearing each device were evaluated for two distinct content types.We found that device design can potentially influence impressions of real-world sound, such as auditory source width, listener envelopment and punch, and subjective impressions during AAR experience.Devices with high transparency were more likely to draw attention to real-world sounds when users were experiencing AAR, and the experience was evaluated as enjoyable and natural.Two demonstration experiments showed that adding virtual sounds by open-ear earphones to real contents can provide acoustic effects such as distance enhancement.

For array-based acoustic source enhancement, variants of multi-channel Wiener filters are commonly used. The approach includes a Wiener post-filter that requires the simultaneous estimation of the power spectral density (PSD) of the target source and of noise sources for each time-frame. Conventional methods generally do not exploit prior knowledge, such as sparsity of the source, in solving this simultaneous estimation problem. We show that, for common scenarios, the simultaneous PSD estimation with consideration of prior knowledge can be formulated as a convex optimization problem with linear constraints. We use monotone operator splitting (MOS) to solve the constrained optimization problem. Our experiments confirm that the proposed method improves the accuracy of the noise PSD estimation, and that the resulting enhanced target signal is of higher quality.