Ubiquitous Sonic Overlay

Spencer Russell

Responsive Environments

2014-10-16

• our group has been working on sensory experiences combining our natural senses with augmentation from sensors in the environments
• in particular, we're interested in using sound as a medium for communicating sensory information

• sound can only be spacialized between speakers
• the system is obviously not very mobile
• image from bowers-wilkins.com

• very portable, but sounds aren't connected to your environment
• when you rotate your head, the whole sonic world rotates with you
• isolates you from the world
• image from businessinsider.com.au

• we can use established signal processing techniques to place virtual sound sources relative to the listener and play the correct signal into each ear
• the dynamics of how we move our head and body play a big role in the picture of the world that our brain builds up, so we need to track the head to keep a consistent auditory scene

• bone conduction gives us a solution to the isolation problem, so we can seamlessly combine virtual sources with the real world
• image from agdlab.pl

• systems are small-scale
• image from beyerdynamic.com

• or systems are coarse-grain
• image from intelligentheadset.com