Dinkum
Immersive spatial audio group conversations
Dinkum creates a spatial audio environment that matches the participants on the call and allows users to customize the experience to their personal preferences. Additionally, users can immerse themselves in an ambisonic (full-sphere surround sound format) soundscape.
Dinkum makes remote conversations more natural and can increase the conversation fluency as well as the participants' sense of presence and intimacy in the conversation with other participants. Choosing the room type and adjusting your distance to other participants adds an extra layer of seamless interactions to remote conversations that we know from physical ones. Dinkum allows for a new form of communication among groups and has the potential to revolutionize remote digital communication.
A Design Award 2022 Iron Award
A' Mobile Technologies, Application
and Software Design Award.
2021
6 months
Spatial Audio
Communication Design
UI/UX
Tobias Kappeler
Video - please wear headphones!
Application Overview
Users can choose a room-size that matches the type of conversation and the people they are with.
You can change your distance relative to others to enhance the experience and make conversations more realistic.
The position of people on the call is fixed and gets updated automatically according to the number of participants on the call.
Users can customise their character to their personal preference. An abstract representation was chosen to emphasise the audio experience
As each person hears differently and has an individual head-related transfer function, Dinkum comes with a set of predefined HRTF's and can incorporate personalised HRTF's in the future.
You can adjust the audio experience to their liking through the volume of the ambisonic background sounds or the reverberation.
Process & development
Spatial audio signal recorded with a binaural microphone and routed through Ableton Live and a virtual audio interface through zoom. A-B testing between a spatial and mono audio signal in Ableton live in real-time.
You can adjust the audio experience to their liking through the volume of the ambisonic background sounds or the reverberation.
Immersive group conversation with 1st order ambisonic (full-sphere surround sound format) background sounds and reverberation for different room simulations.
Head tracking experiment
Exploring head tracking to increase the immersion of the experience as sound sources remain fixed in the physical environment.
Prototyping the interaction and Interface Design through real-time manipulation of the audio in Ableton Live and the interface in Blender through OSC protocol.
Interaction design prototyping
Prototyping the interaction and Interface Design through real-time manipulation of the audio in Ableton Live and the interface in Blender through OSC protocol.