AUDIFY TUTORIAL SOFTWARE

When asked what the team hoped to achieve with the audio experience, Francesco says: It was challenging but very rewarding – everyone in the team had a different way of addressing this issue, and thankfully we were able to work together to get it right.” Sound of success “We had to split this rendering, using absolute positioning of sounds as well as the more dynamic sounds. Then, fixed sounds of the city were played through the speakers as a reference point to the audience, and when the participant moved, changes in the audio were reflected to those in the room. To tackle this issue, the team relied upon a loud-speaker set up instead of headphones, which is usually used for VR experiences. Audio is trickier - we didn’t want to make it so that only one person could experience this.” He adds, “With visuals it’s a little more straightforward – one person can wear the helmet, while everyone else in the room can look at a screen. For those not wearing the headset, this can seem strange and poses a challenge to the developers of the project as it’s harder to create this level of experience for the audience. “Ensuring that both the person wearing the helmet and the audience in the room could properly experience the audio was very tricky, because the representation of space is different.”įrancesco explains that if the person wearing the helmet moves around, some of the audio cues will become louder or quieter depending on where they are. This is the second time that Francesco has worked with HERE, having been a consultant on a previous project, and he describes the unique challenges he faced with the VR demo’s sound:

Then, using an encoding named Ambisonics, the team created an audio experience that can be interacted with by the user.įor example, if the user approaches a highway, the sounds of cars will get louder, or diminish as you walk away.

AUDIFY TUTORIAL SOFTWARE

Different pieces of software were used to place these different sounds into the demo. These then had to be transformed into a 3D audio experience, using sound rendering.

He adds, “In the demo you’ll hear the real sounds of the train station in Frankfurt, and real noise from all over the city, including traffic and car horns.” “So when you see the raw data being transformed by the cloud in the demo, the sounds heard are from actual data.”įrancesco explains how realism was key, both in the sounds used for the data, and those used for the city. For the data, we got inspiration from a real OEM data set, and made a piece of software which would audify this data.” First, we used sounds to represent the services and the use of data, and second was the sounds of the city itself. “There were two levels to creating the audio for the demo. “I was responsible for ensuring that the 3D audio experience worked well, and helped to design the hardware and software that would make the demo effective both for the person using the VR headset, and the audience in the room.” Sound and visionįrancesco describes how the sounds were used, and the part they played in the experience: We spoke with Francesco Grani, a professor at Aalborg University Copenhagen, who worked with HERE as a consultant and sound engineer on the demo, supervising the creation of the 3D audio for the VR experience.įrancesco tells us more about his role in the demo: We’ve already discussed the impressive visuals on display during the HERE virtual reality demo at the Paris Motor Show, but audio plays an equally important part in creating this fully immersive experience, with the sounds of Frankfurt used to further illustrate the power of the new HERE services.

Audify tutorial