Annual Report 2010 - Fachgruppe Informatik an der RWTH Aachen ...

Corona
Many historical buildings are full of surprising details and stories about historic events that
occurred at the site. Our aim is to reproduce such an event and let the visitor experience
history directly in a vivid and atmospheric way, making history become alive. To achieve this
goal, we augmented the physical environment of the Coronation hall of Aachen’s city hall
with a virtual continuous audio space. When entering the city hall, each visitor borrows a
small mobile device equipped with headphones (Aixplorer). Then she can instantly emerge
into virtual audio scenery of a historic coronation feast.
Imagine you are visiting the coronation hall in Aachen’s historic city hall and are able attend a
historic coronation feast. You enter the room and hear the sound coulisse of a banqueting
crowd around you. Walking through a sea of noises, you pick up some snippets of a melody
somewhere to your left and walk towards the sound’s origin. The tunes become louder and
clearer and you realize that you are hearing a minnesinger performing a historical song from
the time of Charlemagne. After a while you move on, the singing fades away into the ambient
sound coulisse of the feast and the next source you are approaching becomes louder. This way
you can explore the coronation hall and its “secrets” by navigating with your ears.
We are using an Ubisense indoor tracking system to determine the visitor’s position in the
coronation hall. Moreover, a polar sensor retrieves the head orientation. The tracking system
has nearly no impact on the visual appearance of the room. Position and orientation are
immediately sent to the visitor’s mobile device. Applying this information, the device outputs
virtual scenery to the headphones using binaural audio, placing the visitor into a virtual audio
space room. Besides the location-aware rendering, the audio guide can be personalized
regarding the visitor’s language and profile. This project helped us to investigate how to
design an interactive user experience. We examined how exact users are able to localize
sound sources in virtual audio spaces depending on the quality of the binaural rendering.
Furthermore, we will investigate design approaches to support group experience.
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