Prototyping of the Unity-App
EMBARGOED UNTIL 2026-07-01
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Date
2025-12-09
Publication Type
Report
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yes
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EMBARGOED UNTIL 2026-07-01
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Abstract
The quality of the soundscape receives increasing attention in sustainable urban design. However, there is a crucial gap in educating students of the landscape architecture and spatial and urban planning disciplines how to design and evaluate soundscapes. In particular, media are missing to communicate, analyze and assess soundscapes and their changes through urban design measures in an audible way. Our goal was, therefore, to develop a tool for students to gain awareness of soundscape phenomena and basic principles, build competence in integrating environmental sounds into a 3D virtual model, and in analyzing and evaluating audiovisual qualities of outdoor spaces. This tool should make working with sound more accessible to landscape architecture and planning students, who are accustomed to using visual design tools.
In this report, we present the process of prototyping an application that links the Unity game engine with a mixing tool for spatializing 3D audio data of different sound sources within a visual 3D environment. First, interviews were conducted with experts in the field of acoustics, noise protection, auralization, and soundscape design in practice and teaching. In this way, user requirements, specific goals and application situations for soundscape simulation were revealed. Then, a major difficulty was to translate expert knowledge of the spatialization of environmental sounds into Unity by a software engineer who is unexperienced in working with landscape sounds. As a solution, a prototyping workshop consulted by a spatial audio expert was conducted for elaborating a syntax of the app and then developing a first prototype that demonstrates what needs to be programmed.
The workshop resulted in an implementation concept for the Unity-App including a comprehensive reasoning why which aspects were included or not and to which depth. Moreover, an initial prototype was developed in the workshop, which demonstrated basic functionalities. The latter served as basis for discussing the refinement of the Unity-App for testing it with students in the scope of the Innovedum project. Overall, the process can serve as a practical example how transdisciplinary collaboration of experts with very different backgrounds and skills can be facilitated to successfully develop a Unity-based application conceptualized as a teaching medium.
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ETH Zurich
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Software
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Subject
Soundscape; Teaching tools; Educational technologies; Audiovisual simulation
Organisational unit
03823 - Grêt-Regamey, Adrienne / Grêt-Regamey, Adrienne
Notes
ETH Innovedum Project: Unity-App for Soundscape Design and Evaluation