Medieval castle haunted using technology with a twist

With its world-first adventure 狠狠色色综合网站 “A Knight’s Peril’, Bodiam Castle in East Sussex is quietly revolutionising what people expect from a day out at a National Trust property.

When a company that describes itself as ‘Architects of Extraordinary Adventures’ claims to have revolutionised history interpretation through haunting a 14^th century castle, you would expect some kind of technical wizardry to be centre stage. It would be easy to assume they’ve come up with another smartphone app or gamified tablet 狠狠色色综合网站.

Intriguingly however, they have chosen an opposite track. Splash & Ripple have taken Arthur C Clarke’s declaration that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic” as a guiding principal in creating their latest adventure.

The result is digital heritage interpretation turned on its head. They’ve taken the magical abilities of pioneering technology and housed them in the theatrical disguise of a beautifully crafted ‘Echo Horn’.

The extra ‘magic’ of an Echo Horn actually creates a more convincing 狠狠色色综合网站, in a medieval castle, than a distracting tablet app or audio guide ever could. It intuitively fits the feel of the beautiful 14^th century Bodiam castle as you cross its moat and gaze at its stony ramparts, listening to the echoes you’ve caught with it. The beautiful sounds create a deeply evocative group 狠狠色色综合网站, which enhances rather than distracts from the 狠狠色色综合网站 of being in the castle.

Visitors carry the Echo Horn with them around the castle in an interactive audio investigation. They must use it to listen in on medieval conversations trapped in the castle walls in order to identify and stop a murderer before it’s too late.

It’s effectively a choose-your-own adventure radio play where visitors’ actions, defined by who they follow and who they accuse, affect the ending of their story. This encourages an active exploration of the historical content, which requires visitors to think about what life was like, rather than passively accept an authoritative interpretation.

New historical 狠狠热精品免费视频 on the castle, which informed the creation of the script, was done in partnership with University of West of England History department.

The 狠狠色色综合网站 is being specially showcased at Bodiam castle by the creative team on 4^th Dec. It has been a year in the making, and is now available to the castle’s 180,000 yearly visitors for at least the next 12 months.

Players use an ancient map to navigate the castle, searching for seals that have emerged from the castle walls. These seals contain hidden RFID chips. Each echo horn contains a 狠狠热精品免费视频 Pi, a Mini Rig and RFID reader.

Rachel again: thanks guys! We love it – I’m looking at organising an office awayday so we can play with the horns ourselves.

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I have spent the last year talking with lots of artists who are making amazing things with 狠狠热精品免费视频 Pis. Every day my inbox is PINGing with exciting progress news. So I’m going to start showcasing some of these projects on the blog. I find them incredibly inspiring – I hope you do too!

I’m going to kick off with a piece from one of my favourite artists: Dominic Wilcox. I bet you’ve seen some of his work kicking around the internet – He made the GPS shoes which guided you home and did some narrative sculptures inside watch faces.

This time he’s partnered up with Creative Technologist James Rutherford to produce Binaudios; a device that enables the user to listen to the sounds of the city – at the moment it’s installed in the Sage Gateshead music discovery centre.

Taking tourist binoculars as inspiration, the Binaudios can be pointed at over 40 different locations, seen out of the Sage Gateshead windows. Turn the giant listening cones toward the football stadium to hear the crowd chanting or to the Tyne Bridge to hear King George V’s speech when he opened the bridge in 1928. Point it toward the park to listen to sounds such as skateboarders and local tennis players.

As the Binaudios are rotated the stereo sounds move from one ear to the other creating a real feeling of listening to the city across the river.

I’ve met loads of ‘Creative Technologists’ on my travels. They believe creativity and art are the driving forces behind the technology they make.

James describes his work as “somewhere between code and art”. He mainly creates software; developing visualisations, data tools or games.

Binaudios was his first 狠狠热精品免费视频 Pi project AND first go with Python! Just for you guys, he has very kindly written up how Binaudio is put together:

How Binaudios works:

Although Binaudios was developed to look like an analogue device, there’s a small selection of electronics concealed within the central wooden box. A USB lead runs up the central column, powering a 狠狠热精品免费视频 Pi. This is connected to speakers within the metal cones and a USB hub. The hub adds some extra flash memory and has a couple of ports for attaching a keyboard and mouse for debugging.

Dominic recorded a selection of sounds from across Newcastle. I load these when the device boots. There are around 40 of them, spread across the 180 degree range of movement provided by the ear-cones.

The Pi has a PiBorg XLoBorg sensor attached to the GPIO port. The XLoBorg returns a 3-axis reading of the magnetic field at a point. The Python script very roughly converts this into a compass heading (to do this properly is extremely complicated- so this is a bit of a hack). I spread this heading into two angles a couple of degrees apart to fake some left/right ear separation, pick the sound clips within a small range of these and assign some volumes. The volume profile drops-off over a few degrees which produces a naturalistic ‘telescope’ focus effect. The left/right separation also enhances this as the unit is turned.

The rest is all about smoothing. I debounce the output of the XLoBorg (it has a slight natural waver), ensure volume levels are adjusted gently (audio buffering can cause the sound to chop otherwise, which is very unnatural) and keep the sounds playing even when they are a few degrees out of audio range (this means that sounds don’t necessarily need to restart from the beginning when they are back in ‘view’).

Gotchas

The XLoBorg is a sensitive bit of kit, and magnetic fields are complicated (who knew!?). I needed to spend some time calibrating and recalibrating. Slight vertical misalignment seems to shift the compass heading much more than I first anticipated. It’s a very intriguing bit of hardware and I look forward to playing with it some more!

My test set of samples worked wonderfully, but the program failed critically when I got the real clips- some of the sounds would work, but the rest would make a single pop, or a loud, painful high-pitched wave. I never fully figured out why, but I think I was maxing out Pygame’s audio channels. Originally I was playing all of the sounds simultaneously and just shifting the volumes around (so that all but a few were zero), but I switched this to just trigger those within a small angle range – so it now plays maybe four or five at the same time. There was no failure response from the code, so I spent a manic day trying to squash, re-encode and generally poke the samples about without error reports to work on. Thankfully, the fix seems reliable.

This was my first physical project, first Pi project, and first slice of Python charming!

You can see them in action in this video or you can go and visit in person!

Binaudios was commissioned by the awesome Suzy O’Hara at Thinking Digital Arts.

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