Spatialized Anonymous Audio for Browsing Sensor Networks via Virtual Worlds

We explore new ways to communicate sensor data by combining spatialized sonification with animated data visualization in a 3D virtual environment. A system is designed and implemented that implies a sense of anonymized presence in an instrumented building by manipulating navigable live and recorded spatial audio streams. Exploration of both real-time and archived data is enabled. In particular, algorithms for obfuscating audio to protect privacy and for time-compressing audio to allow exploration on diverse time scales are implemented. Synthesized sonification of diverse, distributed sensor data in this context is also supported within our framework.