Posts Tagged ‘sound’

Soundwave

Posted on: February 21st, 2012 by Adam No Comments

This project dealt with “visualizing data” through a hypermedia piece.  I decided to make a Unity piece about the university’s campus (similar to AU).  I walked around campus and recorded both my GPS location and the sounds/noises from each location.  I then took this information and used it to develop the game.  In the game, players can walk around the virtual campus.  As they do so, they’ll notice the ground moving up and down.  This is a visual representation of the waveform of the audio from that location on campus.  An overhead map showing the current location of the player and the locations where the audio samples were taken from can also be toggled on and off.

At the time I didn’t realize it, but rather than the audio from the player’s current location being heard, every audio sample is heard regardless of the player’s position.  This was fixed in Soundwave 2.0.

Unfortunately, the game is unplayable in a web browser for the time being.  Because there are so many uncompressed sounds (I did not realize how big the sound files were when I was developing the game), the game almost always freezes the browser after attempting to load for several minutes.  Perhaps one day I’ll go back and optimize it…

However, the proposal for this project was also created in Unity, and that can be played easily in a browser.

CONTROLS: WASD to move, spacebar to jump, and mouse to look around.

Here’s the original project assignment:

The third project will be developed using similar methods as the previous two, but will be focused on issues related to “information visualization.” How might one visualize data? How might the visualization allow one to understand better, that which is visualized? What hidden patterns are revealed? You will be evaluated on your creative approach to this problem.