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 Ubisense real time location system and a small compass mounted on the headphones communicates the visitor's head orientation to the mobile device. This information is then used by a spatial audio rendering engine to create a plausible audio experience.

2016

• Florian Heller, Jayan Jevanesan, Pascal Dietrich and Jan Borchers. Where Are We? Evaluating the Current Rendering Fidelity of Mobile Audio Augmented Reality Systems.  In MobileHCI '16: Proceedings of the the 18th International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction with Mobile Devices and Services,September 2016.
  

2015

• Jayan Jevanesan. Influence of Elevation on Localization Performance in Mobile Audio Augmented Reality Systems. Bachelor's Thesis, RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, October 2015.
  
• Florian Heller and Jan Borchers. AudioScope: Smartphones as Directional Microphones in Mobile Audio Augmented Reality Systems.  In CHI '15: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, pages 949–952, ACM, Seoul, Republic of Korea, Apr 2015.
  

2014

• Florian Heller and Jan Borchers. AudioTorch: Using a Smartphone as Directional Microphone in Virtual Audio Spaces.  In MobileHCI '14: Extended Abstracts of the 16th International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction with Mobile Devices & Services, pages 483–488,September 2014.
  
• Aaron Krämer. Orientation Measurement for Mobile Audio Augmented Reality Applications. Bachelor's Thesis, RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, April 2014.
  
• Florian Heller, Aaron Krämer and Jan Borchers. Simplifying Orientation Measurement for Mobile Audio Augmented Reality Applications.  In CHI '14: Proceedings of the 2014 ACM annual conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, pages 615–624,Apr 2014.
  

2011

• Florian Heller and Jan Borchers. Corona: Audio Augmented Reality in Historic Sites.  In MobileHCI 2011 Workshop on Mobile Augmented Reality: Design Issues and Opportunities, pages 51-54,Stockholm, Sweden, August 2011.
  

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, ACM Press, New York, NY, USA, 2009.
  
• Thomas Knott. CORONA - Implementation and Evaluation of Continuous Virtual Audio Spaces for Interactive Exhibits. Diploma Thesis, RWTH Aachen University,2009.
  

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