News

05 April 2024

Our inaugural narrative demo experience is steadily approaching the finish line. We recently reached a significant milestone by recording three vintage salon music pieces to enrich our story. Among these compositions is 'Aufzug der Teepuppen', composed by Ludwig Siede in 1920. Notably, it served as one of the accompanying pieces during the premiere of the Finnish silent film 'Suvinen satu' in 1925. This film holds significant importance within our demo's narrative, and the inclusion of 'Teepuppen' will enhance several scenes, sometimes as gramophone recording, sometimes externalised around the listener with each instrument as a separate sound source.

31 August 2023

In August, Matias and Teodors went to University of Huddersfield, UK, to present the project at the AES 2023 International Conference on Spatial and Immersive Audio. Matias talked about the narrative possibilities and techniques, and Teodors presented the custom virtual audio solution in the making. They also set up a 6DoF AAR demo to showcase some of the narrative ideas as well as a miniature version of the tech prototype we've developed within the project.

The talk and demos went very well with inspirational discussions and a lot of thoughts to further analyse at home. The conference was extremely well organised, so a big hand to professor Hyunkook Lee, his team, and all of the attendees!

15 June 2023

The Full-AAR team got valuable insights when Ronja Pahaoja, a developer and accessibility specialist, and another blind individual visited WHS and tested the AAR demo. The discrepancies in room reverberations, which do not yet match the real ones in the current setup, were an immediate clue for Ronja that the virtual characters were not real. However, the interactive and captivating narrative nevertheless engaged the visitors. Some virtual acoustic tricks, such as a virtual fly buzzing around the head, managed to cause them intended exasperation.

Since the dialogue was not written with the visually impaired in mind, there were some directions like 'Please, look at the windows.' which could be fixed by adding relative guidance such as 'Please, turn to your right and look at the window.' This would require some additional scripting but would significantly enhance accessibility.

Ronja was very happy that these kinds of audio-based experiences would allow the visually impaired community to participate in the virtual reality and augmented reality wave. They have often been excluded from it due to its heavy reliance on visual elements.