HORIZON

ambient weather forecast

HORIZON is a physical design concept that enables the user to experience real-time and future weather in an audio-visual way. It creates awareness of the surrounding nature by bringing data-based natural soundscapes into your home ambience. Horizon composes beautiful dynamic visualisations based on real-time weather on the wall it is installed on.

Student Project
Team: Adrian Heymann, Chinmay Bhogaonkar, Lukas Moro
Umeå Institute of Design 
Duration: 4 weeks
2022

Contributions:
Ideation
Animated Visuals
Video + Photos

01

PROCESS

Briefing

Design a product where sound and in particular sound design plays an important role. Put an emphasis on the user experience development and prototyping.

Insight

Weather impacts our planning of activities, how we equip ourselves and it influences our health and well-being. Weather data is viewed daily by almost everyone in practical ways, like apps, tv forecasts etc. These mediums communicate weather in numerical data, which is efficient, but fails to convey the natural feeling of the weather situations. 

How can sound..

• create better awareness of our surrounding nature?

• enhance the emotional impact of the weather experience?

• induce motivation for outdoor activities?

• influence concentration?

Idea

A wall mounted device that uses ambient computing for creating an indoor depiction of the current and future weather using light and sound. 

Wizard of Oz

Our team used the "Wizard of Oz" technique to create a realistic impression of our UX/UI concept.

02

FINAL DESIGN

HORIZON

HORIZON is an ambient computing solution for communicating weather through a procedural soundscape & abstract visualisation. Horizon projects visualisations on the wall and generates ambient sounds, which are influenced by real-time weather data. It has two main modes of operation. In the passive mode, the device stays in the background providing its atmosphere with ambient sounds while appearing like a beautiful dynamic painting. On the user's approach, it switches to active mode, wherein the user can interact with it and get an additional layer of information. The user can also check the forecast for weather in the next few days. If they feel like experiencing different weather, they can skip to another day or even to a different location altogether.

Ambient Computing

Horizon creates parametric soundscapes combining:

• Natural sounds of the weather

• Animal sounds

• Synthesized sounds

When creating the sounds, it is not only using weather information as input. In order to create a soundsphere that people can "read" by recognizing familiar sounds of local flora and fauna, the sound generation also takes geographic location, season and time of the day into account.

Interaction

We created visual guides and audio feedback sounds which make the interactions with the weather display unique. Drag the sun along the horizon through out the day and receive a visual and acoustic forecast of the upcoming weather.

Settings

Your first setup or your favourite location can be set through the horizon smartphone app.