social sonar: spatial audio for social wayfinding
Product Designer
Lead UX Researcher
6 months (Feb - Aug 2025)
Systems thinking
Experience design
Rapid prototyping
Concept testing
Contextual inquiry
2 Design Engineers, 2 Product Designers
Sponsored by Meta Reality Labs
CONTEXT
Meta Reality Labs Research Audio sponsored our graduate capstone project to explore use cases in which spatial audio facilitates human connection and staying present. In a world inundated with screens, spatialized audio cues are easier and quicker to interpret, especially in wayfinding experiences.
overview.
PROBLEM STATEMENT
Where can an auditory display outperform a visual display?
DESIGN RESPONSE
Social Sonar is an interactive spatial audio system that helps people find their way to each other, especially in the last leg of their journey. It differentiates itself from point-to-point navigation in several ways as I'll explore below.
KEY DELIVERABLES
A functional prototype on the Ray-Ban Meta glasses (RBMs) with which friends could play hide-and-seek, or in other words, physically find the other person using only spatial audio
A live demo at the Meta Reality Lab offices to the Research Audio team
An end-to-end experience for novice users, including education, onboarding, and starting Social Sonar via integrations with Meta's social messaging apps (e.g., Facebook Messenger)
A public capstone showcase event and product demo video