Our project, AmbientPhoneBooth, is inspired by the “Wind Phone” in Japan, a disconnected telephone booth where visitors can hold one-way conversations with deceased loved ones.
Developed using an existing phone booth produced by American Telephone and Telegraph Company in 1965, our project explores spatial audio, virtual reality, and tangible interfaces to allow anyone to revisit personal stories while they immerse themselves in a meaningful interaction.
Calling Experiences
The AmbientPhoneBooth focuses specifically on creating a phone-booth-based platform to support the creation of teleabsence experiences. In this project, visitors of the phone booth can make a phone call to feel the presence of their deceased loved ones and bring back vivid memories.
The intimacy of a phone booth cultivates a space where personal storytelling can be evoked through the interactions of the visitor. A modified antique black telephone with a rotary dial input is installed inside the AmbientPhoneBooth.
Picking up the receiver, the visitor hears a dial tone. By selecting a soundscape associated with memories, visitors are invited to enter a liminal zone, where the presence of a loved person or place is evoked by the user’s selection of ambient media which surrounds the visitor through immersive audio and interactive virtual reality.
For the current iteration, we have focused on four core environments, each grounded in distinct universal themes. 1) Domestic Memories; 2) Natural Environments; 3) Transportation; 4) Departures.
The subtle haptic qualities of sound around the visitor transports the visitor, as the bumps they feel on a train ride or the vibratory sensation from fireworks or thunder feel real, full, and ambient
Ed Catmull’s 3D hand and Fred Parke’s 3D face were re-created in contemporary 3D software, and re-animated in an interactive 3D narrative environment.
Interacting in a 3D Timeline
Users explored a chronology of CGI history by retargeting their hand gestures via a Leap Motion Controller onto Catmulls’ “hand”.
The dialogue of the story was told by two bookended iMac G3 monitors, each animated by Parke’s faces, re-animated with the original Apple text-to-speech engine, “MacinTalk”.
Full Project Overview
