The Woods Audio

“The Woods” is a local cooperative mixed reality game that provides players with face-to-face interactions in pursuit of a shared goal using augmented reality and 4-channel audio spatialization panning. While loneliness in our real lives is increasingly recognized as having dire physical, mental and emotional consequences, cooperative games have been shown to build empathy and provide positive social impact. “The Woods” explores the narrative, mechanical, and sonic components of the game, as well as its development process and the player experience. The goal of our team is to develop a narrative driven AR game that promotes collaborative problem-solving and engages players in an emergent physical and digital experience.

To know more about “The Woods”, head to http://wizaga.com/thewoods.html

This repository contains the audio part for The Woods AR game.

Head to the releases page for the latest build.

Please cite our paper:

@inproceedings{TheWoodsPaper2021,
author = { Swearingen,Scott and Kyoung,Swearingen and Camara Halac, Federico and Ammannagari,Sruthi and  Hall, Matts},
title = {The Woods': A Mixed Reality Two-player Cooperative Game},
year = {2021},
booktitle = {ACM SIGGRAPH 2021 Proceedings},
series = {SIGGRAPH '21}
}

Patch Reference

Instructions

Download the .zip file inside the releases pages. Unpack the file in your folder of preference. Now, you can open the app:

  1. Double-click on the executable file for your system.
  2. First time only: If prompted to create a directory, please click “Yes”
  3. First time only: If prompted with allowing microphone access, please select “Yes” or “Allow”.
  4. Once the application has opened: select “stereo” or “quad” on the top-left corner of the patch window. The default is “stereo”. You can change this depending on your setup.

Stereo

The default is a stereo (2-channel) setup, so you can run this with your computer connected to two speakers (or headphones) for testing.

Quad

If you have 4 speakers and an audio interface with 4 (or more) channels, you can select the “quad” setup. You will also need to do the following (only once) inside the Pd application

  1. Connect your audio interface to your computer
  2. Open the Pd executable
  3. In PD, go to Pd > Preferences > Audio Preferences. This will open a pop-up window in which you can select your audio interface.
  4. Under the “Input Devices” and “Output Devices” menues, select your audio interface.
  5. You need to specify the number of channels on the right number input box.
  6. Finally, click “Save All Settings” and then “OK”.

If all is correct, audio should now be sent to channels 1-4 of your audio interface.

ADVANCED: if you open channels 5 and 6 in ‘quad’ mode, you can route a binaural rendering of the experience for recording.

Score

The Woods Score

Acknowledgments