NEWS AND RESEARCH UNIKEN August 2003 • 4

It’s O-week in the year 2008.  UNSW freshers are given headphones and a hand-held wireless device, told to tune in and go for a walk.
    Instead of finding their way around the University with a map, the students wander through campus with their wireless audio guide.  The guide pinpoints the student’s location using positioning technology such as GPS and then responds to triggers at different locations giving the student a campus soundscape of song, music and historical information.
    It might sound far fetched, but two UNSW researchers and a Sydney-based sound artist have already designed a prototype of the audio guide – known as Audio Nomad.  The project was recently awarded more than $400,000 in Australia Council and ARC funding, for its unique marriage of computer science, satellite navigation and sound artistry.
    Audio Nomad and the campus navigator program are the work of Dr Daniel Woo from the human computer interface lab in UNSW’s school of computer science, Professor Chris Rizos from the satellite navigation and positioning laboratory in the school of surveying and spatial information systems and sound artist, Dr Nigel Helyer.
    Woo brought his expertise in human computer interaction, user interfaces and mobile technology to the project, designing the architecture of the platform.  Rizos worked on the GPS for the device and the database technology, which would allow sound files and information to be downloaded. Helyer, who had previously worked with Rizos on another portable audio guide, worked on the quality and texture of the soundscapes.
    Rather than hearing a fixed and one-dimensional soundtrack, such as those available on audio museum guides, Audio Nomad will give users a multidimensional and interactive ‘landtrack’ based on their surroundings which have been charted in a software map.
    The campus navigator system is only one of a range of applications for the platform.  Audio Nomad could also be used by the visuallyimpaired, by people with disabilities and even in a GPS-linked warning system for small boats.
    It has obvious applications in tourism – users could retrace the course of the now demolished Berlin Wall or a historical cityscape.  It could also revolutionise the global museum guide industry which is worth up to $80 million a year, says Helyer.		     “The audio guide industry is tied up by a small number of companies.  We could launch into that market and we would do so offering an entirely different type of experience to the traditional museum guide,” he says.
    “The idea is that all this technology will then spin back into our campus navigator program,” says Woo.  “I’m trying to promote a homegrown strategy to whatever we do.”
    He wants to retain control of the infrastructure technology for the platform and build as much of the system at UNSW as they can.
    “The hardware’s not important, because the technology will change over the next five years.  It’s the infrastructure technology we need to deploy all these things – the database at the back end, the wireless activity, how the device acquires its data and what data to download,” says Woo.
    In the next year they want to finish road-testing the prototype, so that a campus navigator program will be ready for commercial release in three to five years.  To that end they’re currently working on two artistic projects, which Helyer is overseeing, for the 2004 International Symposium of Electronic Arts to be held in Helsinki, Stockholm and Tallinn.
    One is for a fixed Audio Nomad, which will work off a platform on the deck of a ship, with a soundscape based on Helsinki’s port.  The other is for a hand-held device, similar to the campus navigator, loaded with a soundscape of Tallinn’s medieval history.
    Helyer says he wants to give users of Audio Nomad and its successors a rich sense of space, terrain and history, which will be unique to the aural medium.  “I hope users will have the realisation that while they’re in the present, there is that sense of otherness, almost like the idea of parallel universes, a history of other people, of other worlds, other times.”