Phone Capture Apps: “Dolby on” and “MoCáp”
For this week’s looking outward towards interesting phone captures apps, I wanted to highlight “Dolby On,” which I tried for the first time last year (2023). Dolby On has since become my go-to for audio recording since the sound quality seems to be better to me than other recording options I’ve tried on my phone and laptop.
I recently used Dolby’s recoding app in combination with some other tools to make an audio walk for my friend Revati. I made her a walking route on campus that passed by a bunch of my favorite tree species. I made the audio walk in an attempt to share a personal experience of moving through an outdoor space and noticing the trees within it. I combined a spoken audio track which I recorded using Dolby On with some clips of music that I like. I wanted to combine maps and audio and think about designing an experience based on place, movement, and speed.
In terms of the recording audio quality, unfortunately, I couldn’t avoid the sound of wind sometimes. Overall, Revati loved the walk – she didn’t get lost and she learned about some trees species she hadn’t heard of before.
Below are some images that indicate which tools I used to make the audio walk as well as the final walking route (I printed the map with the route and shared the audio mp3 file with her).
Another capture app that I investigated briefly is called MoCáp, which captures full body movements of one person and returns them as a motion file that you can open and edit in a software like Blender. I downloaded MoCáp just to see how it worked because I was curious about the apple watch being one of the compatible devices. While using it, I learned that the apple watch is used to stop the animation, which would be useful for motion capturing yourself. A limitation of this app is that it only detects motion of one person at a time and gets confused if you have multiple bodies moving in the camera view.