Rings of Time is a web application that provides an immersive auditory driven experience. The product uses locative media and location based augmented reality, using GPS data and mobile device orientation data to support the user in acquiring spatial audio through noise cancelling headphones. In a natural, immersive experience, the user locates various points of interest and views an augmented reality model of the castle’s appearance during various historical eras at the attraction’s location.

Progressive, Multi-layered and Multimedia experience

The Rings of Time project will configure tourist attractions to be filled with points of interest using PMM (Progressive, Multi-layered and Multimedia experience) experience circles. By accurately detecting and calculating the geographic location and orientation of visitors in the park, visitors will be able to passively determine the characteristics of their nearby points of interest through sound characteristics, direction, and volume levels. As the visitor approaches the point of interest, a variety of events will be triggered sequentially based on the distance between the visitor and the point of interest.

Goal and Application

The project aims to address the common shortcomings of traditional tourist aids such as lack of immersion, convenience, and intuitiveness, and to improve the playfulness and interactivity of the tour on this basis. The project has been used for the first time in the UK at Nottingham Castle in 2022 to help visitors better understand the changes in history.

Rapid deployment and configuration

The demo version of Rings of Time has been deployed to an online server and open sourced on Github. The project offers a high degree of freedom of parameterization, allowing users to quickly integrate Rings of Time into different tourist attractions by simply uploading coordinates, images, and audio of the points of interest.