SpatialGuide
An Android tourist guide with 3D spatial audio — presented as an invited talk at the Portuguese Audio Engineering Association.
- Client
- Academic project
- Year
- 2018
- Role
- Project lead & developer
- Stack
- Android, Java, Google Resonance Audio, Django, Django REST Framework
The problem
A university course project (Projeto em Engenharia Informática, DETI-UA) with an ambitious goal: a tourist guide that wouldn’t just show text on a map, but give the user an immersive audio experience — information about points of interest heard as if it actually came from that location, guiding the tourist by sound as much as by screen.
The solution
An Android app that tracks the tourist’s location via GPS and plays spatialized audio over each point of interest, using head rotation (headphones) to create the illusion that the sound comes from the location’s real direction. A Django backend manages routes, points of interest, images and audio files. I led the project and authored the Android app, with a team of 5 (Miguel Brás, Nuno Barbosa, Ricardo Pombeiro and Daniel Carvalho).
Stack and decisions
Google Resonance Audio for the 3D sound spatialization engine — the most technically demanding piece of the project. Backend in Django + Django REST Framework to manage routes/points/media through a simple admin panel any team member could operate without touching code.
Result
The work was invited to be presented at the Portuguese Audio Engineering Association meeting (APEA, the Portuguese AES branch) in November 2018 in Porto — external validation for a project that started as coursework.