Last month myself and sound designers Samuel Sturtivant and Marie Tueje worked on a project with the Robotics department at the University of the West of England. Virtual Reality for Teleoperation of Robotics in a Nuclear Decomissioning Environment it was pitched as, which meant absolutely nothing to me. But, I’m a sci-fi nut (obviously, surely all VR-heads are) and they had me at robotics frankly.
Robotics and VR may be a relatively new pairing but it’s certainly been well explored in its infancy. A great example of this is Pollen Robotics’s mechanical friend Reachy. Mike at VRO has a fun video to show what it’s about, as well a what the company hopes it could become in an everyday setting.
Reachy is clearly just the start of what robotics and VR could be, and it seems Pollen Robotics are aware of this having made the software and the schematics of Reachy open-source. As said on the website “Reachy is the first solution available on the market to offer remote teleoperation of a humanoid robot, using virtual reality.”
That word again teleoperation was the big draw that brings VR and robotics together, VR is a means to inhabit a different body in a different environment. It’s literally built from the ground up to do that as effectively as possible, so to combine that with teleoperation is surely a no brainer.
But, this project with UWE wasn’t an exercise in humanoid robot teleoperation. We were tasked with creating purposeful and informative sound design for a device that you would be forgiven for thinking is a competitor in next years’ Robot Wars.
To be honest, creating realistic sounds for parameters such as distance from objects, contamination and force applied felt fairly straightforward. We all have a general idea as to what machine and industrial warnings and operation sound like through gaming, television and other popular media. For me, contamination meant radiation (as it was for nuclear environments) which took me straight to the Fallout franchise. Force in machines struck me as the sound you’d hear when a car is accelerating hard, and distance reminded me of something like the submarine radars in a whole host of popular films. The trickiest part of the project, was creating the abstract alternative to these sounds.
When told that we were to provide realistic and abstract sounds for the project, I immediately had decided to interpret ‘abstract’ as the opposite of whatever my realistic sound was. If something sounds more dangerous the closer you got, I chose to make it more inviting. Instead of the rhythmic clicks of a geiger counter, I opted for a still rhythmic tap of a soft piano key. It certainly allowed some artistic license..
The final point in the brief, and approached in the second workshop of the project, was the combination of all three parameters in a way that would be intelligible if all playing together. Similar to any game audio, you wouldn’t want your stamina bar dropping to sound the same as your health increasing for instance and this application is no different and I had fortunately thought about this going into the first workshop.
The best thing about this project, for me, was getting re-acquainted with FMOD after a fairly long time venturing further into Unity‘s audio engine and the other side of the game audio pond in Wwise. FMOD is such a fantastic piece of FREE software, and it’s really created with DAW users in mind, so if you are an audio engineer who is curious about adaptive audio, spatial audio or interactive sound you should definitely start with it.
Apologies for the short ending to this blog, and the delay (this was supposed to be up at the start of this month!). Unfortunately a computer crash wiped all of what I had written away, and I’ve struggled to bring myself to re-write the whole darn thing again!
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