• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, August 19, 2014

Children laughing while playing in a park, honking horns from a busy Manhattan street intersection, and water running through the rocks of a rushing waterfall are some of the sounds that Google's Street View lacks. Developers at Amplifon have developed a code snippet that adds everyday sounds to Street View by fusing Google's application with a Web audio API.

Sounds of Street View by Amplifon stereophonic output makes the experience more realistic. A sound from the left is heard from the left speaker and a sound from the right is heard from the right. It also takes into consideration when sound occurs behind the viewer, considering latitude and longitude and the mathematic distance between objects for every sound through marker images not seen by the user. It gets translated in the form of volume.

The technology also considers the direction the user faces as well as ear limitations and the shape of human ears to limit frequencies, per the company's Web site, which gives step-by-step instructions on how to add sound.

The Street View demonstration for the Buckingham Fountain in Chicago provides one example of how the application from Amplifon works. The closer the viewer gets to the fountain, the louder the water.

The company also launched a campaign asking designers to upload their Street View projects to a Web site for a chance to win a holiday voucher and a one year's subscription to the Adobe Creative Cloud Students and Teachers package. There are five packages to give away that include the latest Photoshop, Illustrator and more, along with cloud features. The closing date for the competition is Dec. 1, 2014.