Sonic Sculpture: Activating Engagement with Head-Mounted Augmented Reality

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.