Space Walk - visiting the solar system through an immersive sonic journey in VR

Abstract

Space Walk is a navigable virtual planetarium designed for the Oculus Quest VR headset. It provides an educational yet accurate representation of the Solar System, including visualizations of scientific data, such as magnetic field lines and atmospheric phenomena, and accompanying explanatory text. A navigational interface allows the visitor to travel between planets. As a complement to the visual content, an ad hoc modular soundtrack has been composed, meant to characterize sonically each celestial object and to offer an audio counterpart for each of their possible data visualization layers. Each sound layer could work both in isolation and together with all the other layers, still keeping coherence of the musical discourse. It is also meant to pay tribute to a vast network of literature from Sci-Fi film and video game music, remaining appropriate within a rigorous scientific context. Finally, it integrates both stereophonic and immersive sound spatialization techniques. A fixed rendering through the interactive sound journey can be found online 1 . The full VR experience is freely available on the Oculus AppLab and can be played on Oculus Quest 1 and 2 devices 2 .