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Aural and visual appreciation of arts

June 26, 2002

Museum visitors appreciate the direct access to relevant information provided by audio-guided tours of exhibitions using headsets that eliminate the need to leaf through fat catalogs to read about the works of art. Imagine, how much more exciting it would be if exhibits could recognize a visitor's focus of interest and interact with him directly. Or, if the real museum environment were to be enhanced by interactive soundscapes. What may sound like a fantasy is already on its way to become real at the Museum of Modern Art in Bonn, Germany. In the coming year an installation of Swiss artist Beat Zoderer will be exhibited in astonishing new contexts enabled by the multimedia system LISTEN.

"The purpose behind LISTEN is to create a new kind of enhanced reality," explains Gerhard Eckel of the Fraunhofer Institute for Media Communication IMK in St. Augustin near Bonn. "Real visual space will be experienced in a new way through the integration of acoustic elements. The museum is an ideal testing ground for our work, since we can apply the new audio system as both an artistic and pedagogical tool. For artists, the new technology opens up realms of possibility never before imaginable." What is more, the technology also creates a new generation of audio guides. When visitors put on the headphones, the system identifies their focus of interest by analyzing their movements and offers the relevant informations. "This can be texts, original sound bites, interviews, special features or strategically placed sound sources in the room," describes Eckel, who heads the project at the Competence Center for Virtual Environments.

LISTEN is enabled by two antennas integrated into wireless headphones worn by the visitor. Hidden inside the walls of the room are receiver antennas which identify the location of visitors and transmit their position and the direction of their gaze to a computer. This data is then fed into IMK's program AVANGO. The virtual reality system sends the individual control commands back to the audio guide. Apart from the Museum of Modern Art there are project partners from France and Austria too. "Our goal in the coming year is to be able to supply information to eight people at the same time," says Eckel. Preliminary trials of the new audio system in January 2002, in which journalists also participated, produced promising results. Art lovers and creative artists can now look forward to the first real-life application of the new technology.

Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft

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