Reacquainting with Everyday Urban Nature: Exploring Natural Soundscape Restoration with Personal Audio AR

Paper Title

Reacquainting with Everyday Urban Nature: Exploring Natural Soundscape Restoration with Personal Audio AR

Publication Info

• Topic area: Urban nature restoration using personal Audio Augmented Reality (AR).
• Keywords: Audio AR, natural soundscapes, urban greenery, eco-awareness, nature connectedness, augmented soundscapes, GPS error resilience, biophony, urban greening, environmental reflection.

Background and Problem

• Problem / challenge: Urbanization reduces natural soundscapes, leading to diminished nature connectedness and eco-awareness. Existing technologies focus on revealing or recording natural phenomena but rarely explore in-situ simulated nature, especially for personal use.
• Significance: Restoring natural soundscapes can enhance eco-awareness, nature connectedness, and reflection, potentially influencing attitudes toward urban greening.
• Motivation and related work: Prior work in HCI has explored technologies to reconnect people with nature, such as bird sound recognition and wearables for eco-awareness. However, the use of simulated natural soundscapes in everyday urban environments remains underexplored.

Solution

• Proposed approach: GreenAR, a personal, location-aware Audio AR system that restores natural soundscapes by generating spatially and visually congruent biophony (bird and insect sounds) based on OpenStreetMap greenery data.
• Novelty:
  1. Open-source, personal Audio AR system for urban natural soundscapes with visually congruent placement.
  2. Soundscape design guidelines for GPS-error resilience and ecological realism in urban environments.
  3. Observations linking soundscape restoration to increased nature connectedness, eco-awareness, and reflection.
• Procedure and key techniques:
  • GreenAR synthesizes soundscapes using species-specific audio assets from databases like eBird and Xeno-canto.
  • Sound placement is informed by OpenStreetMap greenery data and adjusted for GPS errors using strategies like anchoring sounds to stable areas and increasing audible radii.
  • The system dynamically adjusts soundscapes based on user movement and environmental context, with features like head-tracking and sound density customization.

Results

• Concrete findings:
  • Participants reported significantly higher pleasantness, perceived naturalness, presence in a natural environment, and nature connectedness with GreenAR.
  • One participant reversed their stance on urban greening policies after using the system.
• Advantage over baselines:
  • Error-resilient soundscapes were preferred over baseline designs in terms of realism and audio-visual congruence.
  • GreenAR significantly outperformed the baseline in metrics like pleasantness, naturalness, and overall preference.
• Experiments / evaluation:
  • Study 1: Error-resilient sound placement evaluation (n=16) showed higher realism and congruence.
  • Study 2: Campus study (n=16) comparing with/without GreenAR across day and night demonstrated significant improvements in all experience metrics.
  • Study 3: Week-long field study (n=12) across five countries revealed heightened eco-awareness, behavioral changes, and reflections on urban nature.
• Limitations and future work:
  • Reliance on OpenStreetMap data led to inaccuracies in greenery detection.
  • iOS restrictions prevented background execution of the app, requiring a dedicated device.
  • Future work includes improving greenery detection, exploring long-term effects, and balancing ecological fidelity with user preferences.

Summary

This paper presents GreenAR, a personal Audio AR system that restores urban natural soundscapes by generating spatially and visually congruent biophony. Through three in-situ studies, the system demonstrated significant improvements in nature connectedness, eco-awareness, and reflection, with some participants altering their environmental attitudes and behaviors. The research highlights the potential of simulated natural soundscapes to enhance urban nature experiences and influence environmental perspectives. Future work will address technical limitations and explore the long-term impact of such interventions on users’ relationships with nature.