SoundPark is a multi-player ubiquitous game, with the objective of collecting audio clips and depositing them in a staging area. Central to the game are the themes of highly coupled interaction and communication between players with different roles and an engaging blend of interaction with both the physical and virtual worlds. To this end, numerous technologies including locative sensing, miniature computing, and portable displays had to be integrated with a game middleware and audio scene rendering engine.

Soundpark is based on Mobile Audioscape, a system managing wide area mobile audio environments. Multiple participants share an overlaid continuous virtual audio environment, while navigating through real physical space. Each user is equipped with a mobile computing device, GPS receiver, orientation sensor, microphone, headphones, or various combinations of these technologies. We investigate methods of location tracking, wireless audio streaming, and state management between mobile devices and centralized servers.

The system allows mobile users, with subjective 3-D audio rendering, to share virtual scenes containing interactive audio elements. These elements can be organized into large-scale spatial audio interfaces, thus allowing for immersive mobile performance, locative audio installations, and many new forms of collaborative sonic activity.