Hi, I’m Frazier, part of the Quality Assurance team at Microsoft Soundscape. Today I wanted to share a memorable experience that I had while using Soundscape.
I was on the train to London Paddington with Steven Abrams, the Quality Assurance Lead for Microsoft Soundscape. We were heading to London to test how well we could navigate using the Audio Beacon and a few different head tracking headsets.
Our plan was to travel around London testing Soundscape, and find our brunch spot—a small café in South Kensington called Muriel’s Kitchen—using the Audio Beacon. We wanted to test how the experience with the Bose Frames Alto’s and the Apple Airpod Pros compared to standard earbuds. Both of these headsets can tell Soundscape which way you are facing, allowing us to effortlessly hear the audio beacon and callouts in 3D while keeping our phones in our pockets.
When we stepped off the train at London Paddington, we thought “it’s only a few stops on the London Underground to South Kensington, I’m sure it can’t be that far to walk”. We checked, and it was going to take a quarter of an hour if we took the Underground, and about twice that time to walk, but at least we would be outdoors in the sunshine. It was a no brainer… we decided to enjoy London in the summer sunshine!
We walked out of the station into the hustle and bustle of London. Using Microsoft Soundscape, we set an Audio Beacon to Muriel’s Kitchen and connected our Bose Frames. Soundscape announced that Muriel’s Kitchen was 2.4km away, and from the direction of the audible tone I could tell it was roughly to the south of us, through the beautiful Hyde Park. As we started our walk, we passed through some areas around Paddington station that I’d never been to before—I’d only ever left Paddington station on a train! Using Soundscape, I was hearing the names of a number of shops and businesses being called out around me, giving me a real sense of what was in the area in a way that I wouldn’t usually notice. I heard a cash machine called out which reminded me that I had no cash on me. I looked in the direction of the callout and there it was. We made a short detour to take out some cash before continuing our journey.
After about 5 minutes of walking, we made it to the entrance of Hyde Park, I’d never realised how close it was to the station before!
As we entered the park we were greeted by the sight of the ‘Italian Gardens’ and their numerous fountains spraying glistening water in to the air. In front of these gardens was an ice cream van, which looked very inviting during the warm weather. We created a Soundscape Marker on it so that we could find our way back to the ice cream van later (assuming we still had room in our stomachs after our brunch!)
Walking through the park, we heard a callout for ‘Peter Pan statue’. Intrigued, we found it in our recent callout list and set an Audio Beacon on it to find out where it was. We found it off to the side of the path, surrounded by tourists. Steven commented that he had walked past this statue several times and until today never knew it was the statue of Peter Pan!
Once we’d found the statue, we switched our Audio Beacon back to the brunch bar and continued our walk through the park, using the direction of the Audio Beacon to seamlessly make decisions about which way to go when the path forked. And I don’t exaggerate when I say there are lots of paths crisscrossing this park in all directions. Occasionally, we took our phones out of our pockets to use them as a pointer to make sure the Bose Frames head tracking was still correct and that we were choosing roughly the right direction.
We stumbled upon a bright green parakeet amongst a group of pigeons—you don’t get those on the London Underground! After a quick search online, we found out it was a Ring-Necked Parakeet and that there are a number of them in London, quite how there came to be a number of these exotic birds here still seems to be up for debate!
We continued following the Audio Beacon, and as we approached the edge of the park, we saw a large golden structure covering a golden statue and used Soundscape’s ‘Ahead of Me’ command to find out that it was the Albert Memorial, which I later learned is a memorial to Prince Albert that was unveiled in 1872.
Just nearby, at this southern edge of the park, was an acrobatic school, which was fun to watch for a few minutes—lots of nervous looking students trying out the trapeze for the first time! At this point, I took the opportunity to switch from the Bose Frames to the AirPod Pros to test them for the rest of the walk.
On leaving the park, we soon found ourselves in the museum district, walking along ‘Exhibition Road’, hearing callouts for Imperial College London and the Natural History Museum. Again, this is somewhere that I’d only ever been to and from by train on the London Underground. This trip was really helping me to piece together where different London landmarks are relative to each other!
Continuing to follow the Audio Beacon, we soon found ourselves in the busy South Kensington area, full of cafés, restaurants and tourists. Now it was just the case of finding our brunch spot. Standing still, I turned my head from side to side while listening to the Audio Beacon. Once I was facing in the right direction, I could hear the tone of the beacon change so I knew that was the way to head. I heard “beacon 75m”, we were getting close. Before long, Soundscape announced we had arrived and sure enough, just ahead of us was the door to Muriel’s Kitchen.
For the walk back to the station we decided to go via the Albert Hall, seeing as we’d been so close to it by the Albert Memorial, but hadn’t stopped to admire the architecture.
After walking around the Albert Hall, taking in the impressive brick work and 800-foot-long mosaic, which was lit up wonderfully by the afternoon sun, we set our Audio Beacon on the ice cream van Marker we’d created earlier to get something cool before getting on the train.
Using Microsoft Soundscape for this walk had given me the opportunity to make my own way without worrying about getting lost or going too far off course. I could do the walk again and go a totally different route, but still be confident that I knew where I was, or at least I would know where I was as long as I kept following the beacon!
All in all, it was very useful day of testing, with a very tasty brunch to keep us fueled for the walk!
Helpful tips
Searching for a place
If you know the name of the place you’re looking for, select the search bar on the Soundscape home screen and type in the name—a list of results will appear under the search box. Selecting the one you were looking for will open the ‘Location Details’ page, where you can save the place as a Marker, set an Audio Beacon on it, start Street Preview at it, share the location, or open it in another map app.
Using the recent callout history
To find a list of places that you’ve heard Soundscape call out recently, tap on the search bar on the home screen and scroll down to the ‘Recent Callouts’ section of the page. Here, your recent callouts will be displayed. This list will show the last 50 callouts for your current session. If you close the app then it will clear this list. From this list, you can tap on a callout to open the ‘Location Details’ page for it.