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The Rise of Audio AR
For a bit there, virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) were being heralded as the next big thing.
Meta went all-in, spending billions on Oculus R&D annually and eventually rebranding the company to signal their focus. Microsoft’s Hololens had plenty of buzz, Magic Leap was the darling of the tech press and investors, Sony shipped millions of PSVR units, and Apple was rumored to be working on something big.
Oculus has yet to find its killer app and no one’s quite sure what to do with Apple’s Vision Pro. ChatGPT arrived and AI quickly became the next big thing, bumping VR/AR to the back of the line.
Even Meta seems to talk more about LLaMA than AR these days.
But quietly the pieces have been coming together for a different kind of AR: Audio Augmented Reality (AAR). Thanks to the rise of smart headphones, improved voice recognition and generation, AI language models, and better contextual data, AAR is set to slowly but surely seep into our daily lives. AAR will deliver the right information, at the right time without requiring us to change our focus. It’s a monumental shift in how we interact with technology, and it’s coming sooner than you think.
The concept of Audio AR isn’t entirely new. Microsoft’s Soundscape and FourSquare’s MarsBot were two early attempts at delivering an Audio AR experience.
Microsoft’s Soundscape was developed primarily as an accessibility tool for the visually impaired. As users walked through a city, spatial audio pings would notify them of surrounding points of interest, from laundromats to restaurants. It demonstrated the potential of using spatial audio and location-based alerts to augment reality. However, in dense urban environments, it created an overwhelming cacophony of sounds. And in suburban areas, it was too sparse to be very useful.
FourSquare’s MarsBot took a more personalized, data-driven approach. It leveraged FourSquare’s extensive database of places, their ratings, and reviews to predict and recommend locations a user might find interesting. But MarsBot only thrived in a high-density environment like New York City. It was an experiment – one with great thinking about what it means to be an audio-first AR app – that never really landed. It struggled to be truly passive, demanding too much user attention to filter through irrelevant alerts.
These apps, and experiments like them, broke important ground and showed Audio AR could be used for more than simple turn-by-turn navigation. Soundscape showed the power of spatial audio and location-based notifications for wayfinding. MarsBot pioneered using personalized data and experimented with more humane notifications. But it seems only a very specific set of nerds like myself took notice. Their ideas lay dormant for a few years, waiting for the right enabling technologies to arrive.
Several key technologies have emerged in recent years, enabling a new generation of Audio AR applications: