Eyes Free: My Ears Onto Here - Sonic Augmented Reality

"Immersive media has been mainly developed for visual consumption through goggles or devices overlaying visual content in real time and space. Humans live in an immersive world and for us our hearing is 360 and our vision 180, audio is underused as an immersive creative content experience and the project partners want to understand how audio content may be best used to overlay or augment reality in an environment, reading a book or map or looking at pictures and photographs to then enrich and inform the experience.

This project will use human-centred design processes to inform the optimum use of audio augmented reality in the creative industries for a new service that anchors audio content where it is relevant to be consumed, a location, map, text, or a picture. Publishing, advertising and tourism will be the target sectors in this design project. In essence we are all the audience as for radio and TV today, so the project will engage with a cross-section of relevant users and media content producers that project partners have relationships with (BBC, Soho Studios, Music industry, publishing, advertising and local tourism e.g. SouthDowns National Park). The project will test content which is relevant to be consumed including editorial, quality, complexity of sound design and the genre (i.e. as a radio station has factual, sport, music, drama, adverts and news we will have selections of content too) within the context of the reality being augmented.

Content will be replicated to all anchor points to allow researching the first optimum applications within the creative industries to take forward. Partners in this 6 month project are RPPtv, who develop intelligent media autonomous cloud services with real time progressive audio generation, and the University of Surrey (UoS) who have design expertise, developed object based audio and rendering technology developed for interactive media consumption by users. The project is supported by subcontractor 4DDesign, experts in design methodology. The partners have existing technology to allow quick prototyping for audience interaction and already existing content will be used and further made by RPPtv sound editors network as required.

The outputs of the project will inform the perceptions, motivations and behaviour for the proposed service of sonic augmented reality within the creative sectors of publishing, advertising and tourism and the way users prefer to consume this augmented reality content to understand customer needs and create new and better ideas for the audiences."