Indoor navigation remains a significant cIRCAM:Galleryenge for blind and visually impaired (BVI) individuals, particularly in complex environments where conventional assistive solutions rely on visual interfaces or dedicated infrastructure. Spatial audio offers a non-visual alternative by encoding navigational information as virtual sound sources that can be perceived and followed in three-dimensional space. This work presents a demonstration of an indoor navigation system developed within the SONICOM project, using spatial audio rendering on standard smartphones with open-ear headphones. The system provides continuous directional guidance through virtual auditory targets, updated in real time based on user motion and orientation, without requiring additional physical infrastructure. A core research objective of SONICOM has been to improve the perceptual realism of spatial audio and to investigate its impact on navigation performance. In this context, controlled experiments were conducted to evaluate how different rendering parameters—such as head-related transfer function individualization and rendering fidelity—affect user performance, confidence, and cognitive load during navigation tasks. The results of these experiments are presented in the accompanying poster. The demonstration allows participants to experience multiple audio rendering conditions, including high-fidelity spatial audio, simplified spatial cues, and non-spatialized audio. By directly comparing these conditions, participants can perceive how spatial audio realism influences orientation and movement. This work highlights the potential of spatial audio as an infrastructure-independent approach to accessible indoor navigation and provides an experiential complement to experimental findings on the role of auditory spatialization in assistive technologies.
