Clemens Anzmann's profile

The Interactive Soundscape - an Acoustic Adventure Game

The interactive Soundscape
The project 'The Interactive Soundscape' is an immersive and interactive sound installation, enabling a user to experience an interactive radio play, interact with its characters andinfluence the story and its ending. The user himself becomes the interface and is able to communicate and interact with the world, the story and the characters completely on the audible layer. This is achieved with motion tracking, a surround headset and a virtual sound engine. Contrary to classic VR installations, VR technology is now used in a new context, creating an acoustic environment without any imagery. The user wears a surround headset, tracked via infra red markers, giving the software the exact position and rotation of the listener’s head. Using off the shelf game development software and infra red tracking, a virtual audible world is created, which puts the user right inside of it and lets him walk around and experience this artificial soundscape. Through triggering events when looking in a certain direction or at certain positions in the room, the interaction functions intuitive and does not disturb the immersion into the realistic audible world. Furthermore, the radio play becomes a game, animating the user to listen and play the the application more than once, discover all the hints and plot lines and to solve all the puzzles. Since there are a lot of different ways of how interact with motion tracking sound, the possibilities of interaction almost have no limits. Triggering events at certain positions or viewing angles, taking the speed of approaching audible objects into account, even nodding or shaking the head to communicate with characters are possible, just to mention a few. Through this kind of interaction, a completely new type of interactive storytelling and gamedesign is created on a new sensitive layer. 
The Interactive Soundscape - an Acoustic Adventure Game
Published:

The Interactive Soundscape - an Acoustic Adventure Game

An acoustic video game / radio play controlled through movement via motion tracking

Published: