Since I’m very interested in mobile applications and AR/VR, I was automatically drawn to “Artis – Sleepwalk”. The interesting thing with this project was that instead of going from the traditional approach of having visual AR/VR, Vincent decided to do it auditory. Some people said that auditory wasn’t AR/VR but he simply replied, AR/VR is to augment reality. And that’s what we are doing. There is no visual distraction. I started to research the project by going on Vincent’s company website. There I looked for the project and found a lot more information than what was discussed in the lecture. There were also links to explore the app and the news article on the actual Artis website. The intended goal of the project was to allow people to explore and understand all the attractions Artis offers through an explorative tour in Artis with custom illustrations. Artis is a large zoo and many of its smaller attractions are overlooked by the bigger, more popular ones. With the new app, you need to go to all the different attractions and collect animal illustrations. It helps to promote all the attractions in the zoo, not just the popular ones. The project was completed by Vincent’s company, Next Empire and a couple of freelancers that he hired. The technology behind this project was using 3D audio. They would record sounds while the user was walking and play them back to create a very tripping effect. They would also play pre-recorded animal sounds when walking past the specific cages/attractions. The sounds messed with your current reality as you didn’t know where the animal noises were coming from. iBeacons were placed in the cages. iBeacons were used to detect where the phones were (location) and which sounds needed to be played. A funny fact was that they also had to keep replacing the iBeacons because certain animals like monkeys were destroying them. In the field of HCI, this project is interesting because it takes a different approach to AR/VR. It strips away the visual element and only focuses on the auditory layer. Proving that it can also be as effective, or in this case, more effective to just have audio. This project intrigues me because I always thought AR/VR had to be visual but hearing Vincent talk about this, it opens a huge opportunity in the auditory space.
https://www.artis.nl/nl/ontdek/nieuws/2019/11/13/doe-de-Slaapwandeling-en-ontdek-ARTIS-in-het-donker/
https://nextempire.net/products/artis-sleepwalk
