Melodious Walkabout, by Richard Etter, is a wearable system that guides a user by contextualizing audio contents s/he is listening to. The system doesn’t use speech and allows the user to listen to her/his own audio contents while being aware of the location of the destination.

Say you’re located in an unknown town. Usually you ask people for the way and struggle with maps. With Melodious Walkabout, you just put on headphones and select your destination and favorite songs on your PDA. The music begins and audio contents reach you from a certain direction. The direction of the virtual sound source unobtrusively tells you in which direction to go.
Melodious Walkabout consists of:
1. A Bluetooth GPS-receiver.
2. A Geographical Information System that calculates the direction and distance to the destination.
3. An Auditory Display that renders personal audio contents in real-time according to the GIS.
Don’t miss Richard Etter’s other project AwareFashion, a shirt that senses your digital and social environment.