Rather than taking just one pixel and sonifying that color, the Kromophone allows the user to average an adjustable square box of pixels around the camera's focus. This essentially allows the user to adjust between fine-grained color distinctions and larger scale, general color trends.
As you move your head around with the camera strapped to it, you associate the locality of the head and neck with the different sounds, allowing you to construct a virtual 3D representation in your mind of where the different colors are located in space.
After observing serveral subjects navigating a sidewalk, we noticed that they tended to turn their necks from side to side as they walked, to allow them to sense their proximity to the green grass (and therefore the edge of the sidewalk.)
We decided to incorporate this feature directly into the software. When in horizontal sweep mode, the camera's focus will sweep left and right across the camera image, simulating this head movement. The sounds produced will also pan left and right in sync with the camera cursor. This will give the user some sense of location. Sounds they hear with their left ear they know will be on their left. Sounds they hear with their right ear will be on the right, and sounds in the center will be straight ahead.
We found that having a tactile remote control for users to be incredibly helpful for toggling features like horizontal sweep and averaging. Letting users control settings like sweep speed, and averaging size at the touch of a button proved to be very helpful for letting them interact with their particular environment as they felt necessary.
