Preview

Concept

AquiFuturo is an augmented reality experience that sonifies a Coast Live Oak. The canopy skeleton is sonified via modal synthesis mirroring structural hierarchy; the root system via RAVE latent-space navigation trained on water sounds. The visitor approaches the tree, places the root system beneath it in AR, and listens to the morphology.

Technical Detail

• —Canopy sonification via modal synthesis: 267-node mass-spring network with per-class stiffness multipliers stratifying the spectrum across five structural classes (trunk base 20–120 Hz to terminal tips 1,500–8,000 Hz). Eigenvalue decomposition extracts 96 natural frequencies and mode shapes.
• —Root sonification via RAVE latent-space navigation: 8 morphological features per node mapped into a 16-dim latent space via PCA. A periodic cubic spline connects TSP tour nodes into a smooth trajectory, decoded in overlapping chunks with crossfades.
• —AR app on iOS via Unity + AR Foundation + ARKit. Nine audio tracks: five canopy layers with orientation-modulated filtering and gain, four RAVE root-zone clips triggered by tap interaction.

Learnings

• —Modal synthesis encodes morphological hierarchy into sound — trunk produces sub-bass, terminal tips produce brightness. But the mapping is not self-evident without interactive tools.
• —RAVE opens sonic spaces beyond deterministic physical models, though the output is shaped by training data as much as by geometry.
• —The pipeline generalizes — any tree with a photogrammetric scan could generate its own soundscape.