As Light as Your Footsteps: A shoe-based wearable device for real-time modification of footstep sounds for illusory changes in body weight

People’s body perceptions are highly malleable, as demonstrated by neuroscientific studies on sensory-driven illusions. At the intersection between psychoacoustics, cognitive neuroscience and technology our work has shown that sounds in combination with tactile and/or proprioceptive cues, can change people’s body perceptions. Join us for a live demo of our shoe-based system, that allows for real-time modification of footstep sounds, and experience the effects on your own perceptions, movements and emotions. Through this system we have demonstrated that dynamic modification of footstep sounds can lead people to perceive their body as lighter, walk more dynamically and feel happier, potentially supporting health.

At the heart of our system is a pair of binaural microphones that capture the particular features of footstep sounds. These sounds are then processed using a Bela.io device that in combination with the SuperCollider computer language has allowed us to achieve precise and real-time processing of footstep sounds. Importantly, the core of our device is open source.

Our system also integrates a range of biosensors and a MoCap suit for capturing movement and posture data. By combining these data sources, as part of our ERC-funded project BODYinTRANSIT, we aim to create a rich dataset to train machine learning algorithms and to understand the relationship between sound, body perception, behavior and emotion, as well as to inform the personalization of future body transformation technologies.

In this show and tell demo, visitors will have the opportunity to wear the sound device and experience the effects on their body perception in real-time. Users will be able to test three different modes of sound processing and they will inform us about how each mode affects their feelings. This interactive demonstration aims to provide a hands-on understanding of the impact of sound processing on body perception and how it can potentially support health and wellbeing.