Hearing aid specialists Amplifon, bring sound into peoples lives everyday, enhancing their quality of life and experiences of the world around them. Our concept was to virtually re-create and capture the emotion of this moment, when a once silent world is brought to life through sound.
Sounds of Streetview is a digital exploration that allows the user to experience locations around the world through a 3D audio environment. Under art direction from the talented Bryan James, I was responsible for the sound design and production as well as helping to develop the original concept of the piece.
Utilising the Web Audio API platform, sounds are manually positioned around the environment using the latitude and longitude values within google maps. The amplitude and panning values of each sound are altered in real time as the user moves closer or further away in the 3D environment. Sounds in front of the user are brighter, as a low pass filter is added to the ones behind, re-creating the natural effect of the human ear. Read more about how it all works.
We felt the this experience shouldn’t just be limited to the three scenes which we had created, so a developer platform was built to allow people to produce their own 3D audio environments. Released on GitHub, the framework lets people with minimal web coding experience start to add their own sounds anywhere in the world on Google Streetview.
This concept unlocks a mass of potential opportunities for sound to really enhance the experience inside Google Streetview and beyond. Imagine exploring these Ancient Temples, but instead of listening to natural sounds like birdsong, you can listen to spoken audio clips teaching you all about the history, giving you a virtual guided tour of the environment.
This project was featured on a host of popular technology news sites across the world:
