MusicAlly profiled prior art for music AR, an app called Landmrk. Landmrk framed this as a promotional campaign for a couple different album releases, creating visibility by motivating fans to engage with new releases.
“When someone enters one of these locations, the content can then be unlocked on their mobile device. When they leave, the content becomes inaccessible again,” explains the company’s website.
Account director Tom Nield explained to Music Ally that the team was originally part of music group PIAS, where it worked with artists including Alt-J. After striking out on its own, the band came calling.
“They were releasing their new album, and wanted to create a unique first-listen experience around the release. They had some ideas around placing park benches where fans could plug in their headphones and listen, but it would have cost an absolute fortune,” said Nield.
“So we had the idea of creating an app that would allow them to highlight the locations where they wanted to place the album, which would populate the map within the app.”
I came across a dongle for iOS devices that allows you to look at the real world using infrared. It struck me as something like augmented reality layer. You could write messages that were only visible with infrared.
Which reminds me of Boris Smus’ idea to emit ultrasonic audio using the web audio API.
connecting devices is a pain and we have been squarely at stage 2 since the release of the iPhone. There are many competing approaches to do this: Bluetooth, Bluetooth LE, WiFi direct, discovery over the same local WiFi network, and many many others. This post is dedicated to attacking this problem from an unexpected angle: using ultrasound to broadcast and receive data between nearby devices. Best of all, the approach uses the Web Audio API, making it viable for pure web applications
It strikes me that you could also use that for music, so that the music was available as an AR layer, discoverable using ultrasonic listening.