Keep Walking, The Future Calls

How can you fully immerse a listener into a story? Headphones, yes. Soundscape, yes. Descriptive language, yes. All of these things help, however, what if you take it one step further by bringing the story into the real world. Not like a performance, but bringing the world inside the story into the real world as well. That is what "Keep Walking, The Future Calls..." achieves.

Set in the Southampton in the year 2038, listeners follow a GPS-based walk around the city centre, each location not only exists in the present, but also has a new meaning in a near-future dystopian world. As you start at the Central Library - now largely closed off to humans and filled with propaganda - and make your way to other historical and important cultural landmarks of the city: the Guildhall (now a oxygen distributor after the O2 Moble deal fell through), the park (now a training centre for a cybernetic army), to Bargate - a barrier yet to be taken over by the machines.

The story follows a human that can no longer deal with the reversal of roles between machine and humans and wants to help save humanity. Mixing fictional elements with real world locations and embedding the history of the locations, Southampton is viewed in a new light to make people look closer to what we already have around us. The experience also utilises spatial audio mixing to immerse the listener even more; using ambisonic recordings to create a 360-degree audio track of each location - so the experience can also be enjoyed remotely as well - in combination with stereo and mono sound effects that are panned around the listener. As you hear voices pass around you, explosions behind you and flying vehicles above, you feel a part of the story.

Upon user testing, the concept and product paid off with users praising the sound design and audio elements and noting that as a result of wearing headphones and taking part in the walk, they felt as conspicuous as the story's protagonist, adding another level of immersion to listeners. The app, izi.TRAVEL, worked well - albeit with some frustrating experiences when uploading elements to the app - and brought the vision of the product to reality.

Overall, "Keep Walking , The Future Calls..." achieved the vision to immerse listeners in a new way by bringing the fictional world and real world together to tell the story. The tour is available at the link below and can be enjoyued regardless of whether you go to Southampton or not.

https://izi.travel/en/0826-keep-walking-future-calls/en