As well as being a loveable lil’ educational guide, Wol is a multi-award-winning, mixed reality AI-enabled experience for Meta VR headsets and mobile devices. Wol joins you in your living room through an AR portal to a Californian redwood forest. You can enjoy a natural conversation about the plants on the forest floor, the lifecycle of a tree or really anything.
As regular collaborators, our friends at Liquid City and Niantic entrusted us with creating immersive forest soundscapes and, of course, music. We also tackled the challenge of designing a character foley system that could react to the unpredictable nature of our independent-minded little buddy.
Ice Breakers
Wol's purpose is to educate users about the redwood forests. But, when you’re chatting away with the little charmer, it's easy to stray off topic. To gently refocus users, Liquid City collaborated with us to design some conversational ‘ice breakers’: Natural, attention-grabbing forest sounds that would cut through the ambient soundscapes to guide discourse back to nature.
Faking It
As a factual experience, capturing the authentic sound of the redwood forest was essential. Unfortunately we couldn’t fly to california to record an owl so we needed to get creative.
In one moment, a distant Northern Saw-whet Owl, Wol’s cousin, calls out. We used YouTube recordings for reference and produced this…
Saw-whet Call
By doing this…
This is a Bocarina nose flute, which we happened to have bought shortly before the Wol project and coincidentally made a convincing Northern Saw-whet call 🦉
