A.SAP-A Spatial Auditory (rapid prototyping) Platform
A.SAP is a rapid and functional “cardboard prototyping” platform for auditory augmented reality (AAR), location-based sound (LBS), and object sonification. The ASAP system is simple and versatile. It can be used by designers, doctors, educators, and others with minimal prototyping and computer skills as a simple tool to rapidly ideate, prototype, and test ideas with real users. Some application and use cases can be education, healthcare, design, music, assistive technologies and many more.
A.SAP is easy to use, requires very little programming knowledge and with some resourcefulness and imagination allow its users to prototypes their ideas in a matter of minutes.
This work was developed in collaboration with Tal Achituv as a robust platform to test the concept of LeakyPhones for my master's thesis.
A Schematic Illustration of the A.SAP Hardware components.
System Hardware:
The system is based on the Vive tracking technology and uses a central audio interface and proprietary software to deal with audio equitation and delivery to different users based on different triggers.
Audio equitation is achieved by casting (Chromecast audio) directly from the user's phone or pairing it with a dedicated Bluetooth receiver to the central computer.
Another option is to upload music/audio files directly to a central computer.
Audio is delivered to the users by Bluetooth transmission from the central computer to eight BOSE QC35 noise-canceling headsets.
A.SAP has a web-based architecture which makes it interactive and hackable. This enables individuals with more advanced programming skills to easily add layers of additional functionalities while enabling those who are less proficient in programming to use the GUI to directly control the system with a minimal set of parameters. The System has 3 main components:
1. An audio server and Audio interface control-responsible of mixing audio channels.
2. A tracking server-responsible for sending the location and orientation of each user.
3. A decision-making program and control GUI-responsible for making audio mixing decisions based on users location and head direction as well as provides a number of web socket clients that help visualize the different parameters of the system.
Software Architecture:
A schematic Illustration of the A.SAP stack.
An Easy to Use GUI
A.SAP has a user-friendly, web-based GUI which allows the users to easily prototype their ideas and test them in a few minutes. The GUI is very easy to use and allows users to expand the system to more modalities. while ensuring that the core technology could be used without any prior knowledge in programming. This opens the technology to new kinds of users, like doctors, educators, designers and artists, musicians, and others, with various levels of knowledge of coding and technology.
so What can you Do with IT?
Some ideas include personalized audio tours, context-aware auditory signs, assistive technologies to overcome sensory overload, auditory augmented reality, easy to use Sonification platform for the visually impaired, a design thinking platform for auditory UX and so many more!