Project name: Way Back Home
Project Description: Way Back Home is a website that puts user in the shoes of Bumble_Broken, an outdated robot that is lost and needs help going back home. Bumble_Broken may not have a working vision-camera, nor a beautifully recorded voice, but has a great memory. After the user hears the instructions, different recordings of landmarks on his way home will be played with binaural audio. It may be coming from the left or the right, and the user will have to carefully listen to where the audio seems to sound from and press the correct arrow key to make his way. The concept of our project is a website that can give the user a break from visual stimuli that the internet is already full of and shifting their focus to the auditory sensations, thereby also widening the accessibility for the users with blindness as well. We were striving to create an experience that can bring wonders to the users with the real-life-like experience of hearing when you are walking across a town.
Process: We first started with an idea that this project could be like an audio comic that takes the user to a way home. From there, we designed a small town with different signature landmarks - waterfall, horse farm, marketplace, and train station - and devised an overall user experience of making turns with two directions. Then we designed the audio by making recordings of the instructions, the voice of Bumble_Broken, and the voices of house owners that Bumble_Broken enters when the user makes mistakes. We also used the binaural panning in Logic Pro to create spatial sensation with the audio files of the different landmarks from different directions and making the sensation that the user is ‘making the turn’. Then we started developing the website, using jQuery to trigger the audio with keydown of arrow keys, and also limiting the audios to play one at a time to avoid overlapping of several audio files. We also made some visual cues - colors and text - to help the users visualize the landmarks they have ‘arrived at’.
Reflection/Evaluation: Our expectations and goals of creating a website that makes the user rely on their auditory senses to make decisions were met pretty well in the process of building the final working version. There were many smaller issues that came up in programming the website, and in the later stages, troubleshooting often took more time, having to wait for the audios to finish playing. However, we consider this project to have met our expectations as the audio stimuli and the user keypresses are working hand in hand.