CORONA

CORONA is part of the Route Charlemagne and is one of the major experiences we develop for the city hall of Aachen.

The goal of CORONA is to create an interactive audio experience in the coronation hall located in the city hall of Aachen, Germany. There are only few visual cues in this 45m x 20m large site that indicate what important ceremonies took place in this hall and, as the hall is still used for festivities, it is not possible to install exhibits that would overcome this problem. Also, the visual impression of this historical site was not to be modified, so we decided to augment the physical space with a virtual audio space. The name is derived from the coronation hall itself as well as the project's audio coronae which can be discovered by the visitor.

At the entrance of the exhibition, you get a small mobile device equipped with headphones. When you enter the coronation hall, you can hear the sounds of a medieval coronation feast. People are singing, shouting, laughing, but you do not see anything. As you move through the coronation hall, the audio impression adapts to your position and head orientation. This allows you to navigate through the scene and come close to some characters. On the one end of the hall, the servants talk about the meals that will be served, a few meters away some musicians prepare for their gig. All these impressions can be explored just by listening.

The visitor's position is determined by a real time location system and a small compass mounted on the headphones communicates the visitor's head orientation to the mobile device. Both informations are then used by a spatial audio rendering engine to create a plausible audio experience.

2009

Florian Heller, Thomas Knott, Malte Weiss, and Jan Borchers. Multi-User Interaction in Virtual Audio Spaces. In CHI EA '09: Proceedings of the 27th international conference extended abstracts on Human factors in computing systems, pages 4489-4494, New York, NY, USA, 2009. ACM Press. .

2008

Florian Heller. CORONA - Realizing an Interactive Experience in Visually Untouchable Rooms Using Continuous Virtual Audio Spaces. Master's thesis, RWTH Aachen University, December 2008. .

Internal Information

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