Virtual Hobart Town
VR APP SOUND DESIGN
This VR app uses spectacular immersive visuals to transport the user back to 1820s Hobart Town. The producers approached us to provide detailed soundscapes to help complete the illusion
Being based near Hobart, we had perfect access to the locations, but two hundred years of progress had changed the soundscape quite a bit! Hobart in the 1820s sounded very different to Hobart in the 2020s, so the first step was to map out what sort of sounds we were going to need to be hearing to create an authentic experience. The team behind the app were able to give us a lot of great information from their own research, and VSM added to that with our own.
We read a lot more about native Tasmanian birds than we ever expected to!
Tasmania is one of the few settled parts of the world where it’s still relatively feasible to get away from traffic noise, so we were able to capture a lot of the natural ambiences as original recordings. In some instances we were recording only a few kilometres away from the historic locations being depicted.
This was a perfect excuse to go for a “working holiday” bushwalk with the family too!
Bringing everything together and creating seamless loops for delivery to the VR producers was the final step. A whole bunch of time with headphones on debating the relative merits of horse-hoof volume.
This is the life’s work we’ve chosen, and we have no regrets 😉