Sonic Sculpture: Activating Engagement with Head-Mounted Augmented Reality

TL;DR

This paper explores using head-mounted augmented reality, specifically HoloLens, to create an interactive sonic landscape that enhances engagement with public sculptures through spatially-aware soundscapes.

Contribution

It introduces a novel approach to sonic sculpture by leveraging portable AR technology, detailing two interaction schemes and technical/usability insights from iterative testing.

Findings

Effective spatially-aware sonic spaces were created around sculptures.

User feedback highlighted the immersive potential of AR for public art.

Prototype interaction schemes demonstrated practical engagement methods.

Abstract

This work examines how head-mounted AR can be used to build an interactive sonic landscape to engage with a public sculpture. We describe a sonic artwork, "Listening To Listening", that has been designed to accompany a real-world sculpture with two prototype interaction schemes. Our artwork is created for the HoloLens platform so that users can have an individual experience in a mixed reality context. Personal head-mounted AR systems have recently become available and practical for integration into public art projects, however research into sonic sculpture works has yet to account for the affordances of current portable and mainstream AR systems. In this work, we take advantage of the HoloLens' spatial awareness to build sonic spaces that have a precise spatial relationship to a given sculpture and where the sculpture itself is modelled in the augmented scene as an "invisible hologram". We describe the artistic rationale for our artwork, the design of the two interaction schemes, and the technical and usability feedback that we have obtained from demonstrations during iterative development.