Amplifon, a hearing solutions company in England, is looking to improve the exploring experience of Google Street View with the addition of sound.
The move comes in the form of a project called "Sounds of Street View," which focuses on using crowd-sourcing to take different sounds from the world, according to NBC News. Users can place a sound and a location marker on the online map, which will provide the "3D ambient sound" of locations on Street View.
So far, only three locations have been built into Sounds of Street View - Place du Palais in France, Hapuna Beach in Hawaii and Balboa Park in San Diego. Ambient background noise, such as low-muttering conversations, birds chirping and running water can also be heard in the program, Gizmodo reported.
"We created a function in JavaScript based upon the haversine formula," said Stephen Griffin, a developer for the project, explaining how the team created the illusion of distance. "The haversine formula is a mathematical formula that returns the distance of two points on a sphere. The sphere in question in the application is the Earth's surface. The two points in question are the user's current position and the sound source location. We use the latitude of each of these two points to calculate the distance in meters of how far that sound is from the user."
Amplifon said adding sound to Street View was important for helping Street View users have more fun exploring the world, PC Magazine reported.
"It's one of the most important human senses, which affects how we observe the world and how we interact, such as giving us an ultimate sense of direction or knowing when danger is upon us - dound. Thousands of people every day experience the world digitally without this key sense, and it's out wish at Amplifon to fill this void," the company said.
Griffin said the Amplifon team plans to come up with new sounds for Sounds of Street View, adding that the concept has ignites the imagination of its users, NBC News reported.
"Our hope is that we get some great 'everyday' soundscapes but also a few really out-there concepts too, such as the internal atmosphere from one of the many Street View stadiums around the world, or perhaps the underwater expeditions!" he said.
