I recently went to see (or, I suppose, hear) a new sound exhibit at the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco called “Are We There Yet?”, which will be on display until July. This exhibit is, in a word, cool. I walked into an architecturally beautiful room and heard different voices reading questions, sometimes overlapping and sometimes complementing each other. Just as cool as the aesthetic experience, though, is the visual tracking system that UC Berkeley engineers developed to give every participant a unique experience. The combination of cutting edge sound equipment with cleverly engineered computer tracking allows the voices to seemingly follow a viewer throughout the room.

The questioning voices of the exhibit are intended to invoke the practice of questioning within the Jewish faith. The engineers who designed the technical scaffolding to achieve this vision also started with a question. “How do you accurately tell the difference between the sun’s reflection on the floor and a person’s bright white shirt, if you’re a computer?” asks UC Berkeley Electrical Engineering graduate student Andrew Godbehere.

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