Going Further

It's the start of June (yay #pridemonth) and the work continues.

My goals for this month:

• Create my own Unity project that successfully uses the HeadphoneMotion plugin to affect playback of a custom sound

• Learn how to incorporate GPS and accelerometer data from the iPhone into a Unity project

• Gather more definitive data from academic sources about Binaural Beats and other therapeutic uses of audio

• Incorporate FMOD into the project to start creating variability in the audio

• Start designing the layout of my poster for the Showcase

I'm shooting for the stars in the hopes of landing on the moon here, so we'll see how much I'm able to truly finish this month, but it'll all be chronicled on here. Future archeologists, you're welcome.

On June 3rd, I attended a little workshop for URO students that showed us how to use some of the resources we have access to through the library, and gave us some inspiration for our poster designs and presentation plans. Posters from previous URO showcases (and other research projects uploaded by students) live on this research repository. Pretty neat!

Meeting with Max Lander and Debashis Sinha

I met with Max and Deb on June 5th, and we talked a bit about what each of us already knew, what we could potentially help each other with, and where this project might end up going in the future. Max comes from a background that's pretty interested in the gaming and tech side of this, and Debashis comes from a more theatrical background, and is interested in some of the narrative aspects of what this project can be.

Max raised an interesting point that I do want to explore. I brought up the fact that I was going to try and figure out how to utilize some GPS data this month, and he asked a critical question: do I want to deal with the ethical implications of collecting said data?

I had honestly not really thought about that before, which seems silly to me now, considering I am very much a "Allow only this one time and stop asking me for my god dang precise location, McDonalds Canada apk I downloaded online!! I don't want you telling me there's a McFlurry sale every time I walk by Yonge and Gerrard because I will be getting a McFlurry that I do not need!!" kinda guy. A lot of very compelling and interesting technology is marred with the fact that it does require you to be a bit surveillance-y and that's not really what I'm about. This seems to be something that AR developers really do need to consider, because it's undeniable that people enjoy bringing the real world into their games, but it does have pretty wild consequences if you let opportunists see those players whereabouts and lure them around the area they live. I'm mostly using Pokemon Go as an example here because it's basically the biggest gamified AR success story, but there are also issues with using the joys of cyberspace to encourage actions in meatspace. (I'm singlehandedly trying to bring back the cyberspace/meatspace in lieu of online/irl cuz I think it's cooler).

As I continue with this work (and within a mostly theoretical framework, if we're being real here), I do think it will be important to consider why I want to have access to certain data, and how it serves the end user versus how it could serve the developer or whatever company owns said developer. I'm trying to do positive things here!

BREAKTHROUGH ALERT!!

After referring back to this tutorial and this tutorial from my RTA864 Immersive Interactive audio days (very grateful I saved all these notion tutorials because they have often come in handy!) I have now managed to have spatial playback of a custom sound that is controlled by the position of the user's head!!!

Rather than creating my own project from scratch as I initially wanted to do, I decided that "if it ain't broke, simply pile things on top of it" and built off of the example scene that I had already been working in. I installed the ResonanceAudio plugin and created a little cube sound source that sits on the left side of the "head" cube, and had it play this little tune that I don't mind hearing looped over and over. I then nested the main camera inside the "head" cube that we've been rotating all this time and gave it the ResonanceAudioListener component, so that it would, in theory, listen to the sound source just like your actual head would.

And, dear reader, it worked!!! I got the build to successfully run on the project iPhone and as I moved my head back and forth I heard good ol "it is a mystery" moving around my ears where it would actually be in space! It's not as responsive or accurate as the built-in head-tracking, but for our purposes it will work nicely!!

So that's 2 things checked off. My next avenue in terms of prototype-building will be to attempt to make a soundscape with multiple sources out of this skeleton program I've slowly been adding bits of meat to. I'll also be examining more potential ways of using the phone's accelerometer and/or GPS to pursue that tasty tasty 6DOF.

Some More Notes On The Psych Stuff

My quest also continues to determine what degree of hoosafudge Binaural Beats are (sidenote: googled this phrase to see if there was a correct spelling and it turns out it may be just me, a guy on reddit, and that guy's grandpa who have ever said hoosafudge. It means nonsense, basically. Add this to the list of phrases I intend to bring back into cultural consciousness). They make my pseudoscience meter go off the charts, especially when I go online and it takes me a decent chunk of time to find one that's actually in stereo. But despite the phenomena being around for a long time, research studies are incredibly inconsistent in both their methods and their results. There is no standard agreement on how to implement binaural beats, and often studies will follow methodologies for previous research just because that's what's been previously published, even when the first experiment arbitrarily selected certain elements like the volume and frequencies of the signals. Because of this, and because you have to wade through a lot of people who will unscientifically conclude that these frequencies are a panacea, there is not a solid consensus on how useful (or how easy to practically utilize) binaural beats are for positive mental effects. Placebo plays a large role in this, and may actually be the key to seeing benefit from including it.