“KAFLI 141”: An Interactive and Immersive Heritage Gamification Experience of the Acoustics of Lögberg, Þingvellir National Park (UNESCO World Heritage Site, Iceland)

I. Framework

Þingvellir, or “the plains of the assembly,” sits on the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, one of the few places on Earth where you can walk between the North American and Eurasian plates as they pull apart a few millimetres a year. The rift and the cliffs of Almannagjá and Heiðargjá are the result of millennia of tectonic movement, eruptions and subsidence. Despite that instability, it was chosen as the political and spiritual centre of the nation.

In 930 Norse settlers founded the Alþing here, the first parliament in Europe. For more than three centuries Iceland was governed entirely through the spoken word: laws were recited from memory. At its heart stood the Lögberg, the Law Rock. The law speaker recited the law before hundreds of people; his voice had to carry some 20 metres from the cliff to the crowd. The amphitheatre-like shape may have acted as a stone auditorium, but this had never been verified scientifically.

II. The research

Over the past six years the Acoustic Heritage Collective has carried out a hybrid archaeo-acoustic study, combining in-situ measurements and digital simulations. On our first visit we made impulse response recordings that let us virtually reconstruct the voice at the Lögberg. This second visit explores its historical and symbolic dimension, combining acoustic engineering with humanity resources.

We also looked for clues in the sagas, working with chapter 141 of Njáls saga, which describes a scene at the Lögberg full of voices and tension. The word is an instrument of power, and is human fragility. The Lögberg is not merely a rock: it is a space of acoustic memory.

III. The Results

From these measurements and GIS models we have begun to reconstruct the auditory experience of a tenth-century assembly. The topography could indeed amplify and distribute the voice naturally. Echoes and reflections from the rock face acted as an invisible architecture, an ancestral acoustic technology. The experience presents the main findings of that research and invites the user to discover how sound behaves in this landscape and how its acoustics may have shaped one of the most experiences in Icelandic history.

IV. The Videogame Prototype (Beta)

The user walks between the two plates. Along the way, objects attract attention visually and sonically. Picking them up reveals historical and acoustic context, and further information appears in the sky. The walk leads to the Lögberg, where the voice of the lögsögumaður proclaims Kafli 141. On the esplanade where the audience would have gathered, six numbered pink diamonds mark listening points. Moving between them, the user hears the full chapter and compares how the voice changes with the acoustic conditions at each position.

Kafli 141, it is still in development and not officially published. It is programmed in JavaScript with the Web Audio API to run in a browser. It can be used with VR glasses, but it is designed to democratize immersive and spatial audio for those who don’t have VR equipment. Heritage has to be accessible to all.

Availability

The prototype can be experienced at https://acousticheritagecollective.org/thingvellir/3d-vr/

Source code: https://github.com/acousticheritagecollective/thingvellir-3d-vr

Suggested Reading

Þingvellir, the Alþing and oral law

Bell, A. (2010). Þingvellir: Archaeology of the Althing (Doctoral dissertation).

Dennis, A., Foote, P., & Perkins, R. (trans.) (1980, 2000). Laws of Early Iceland: Grágás (2 vols.). University of Manitoba Press.

Einar Ól. Sveinsson (ed.) (1954). Brennu-Njáls saga. Íslenzk fornrit XII. Hið íslenzka fornritafélag.

Gísli Sigurðsson (2004). The Medieval Icelandic Saga and Oral Tradition. Harvard University Press.

Hálfdanarson, G. (2000). Þingvellir: An Icelandic “lieu de mémoire”. History & Memory, 12(1), 4–29.

Hannah, L. Þingvellir: A Place of Assembly and a Market?

Mehler, N. (2005). Þingvellir og þinghald að fornu: Framvinduskýrsla 2005.

Njáls saga, ch. 141. English translation: Cook, R. (trans.) (2001). Njal’s Saga. Penguin.

Sanmark, A. (2017). Viking Law and Order: Places and Rituals of Assembly in the Medieval North. Edinburgh University Press.

Þingvellir National Park (2021). https://www.thingvellir.is

World Heritage Committee (2004). Decisions adopted at the 28th session of the World Heritage Committee, Suzhou (WHC-04/28.COM/26). Þingvellir National Park, World Heritage List ref. 1152, criteria (iii) and (vi).

Geology of the rift

Guðmundsson, A. (1987). Tectonics of the Thingvellir fissure swarm, SW Iceland. Journal of Structural Geology, 9(1), 61–69.

LaFemina, P. C., Dixon, T. H., Malservisi, R., Árnadóttir, T., Sturkell, E., Sigmundsson, F., & Einarsson, P. (2005). Geodetic GPS measurements in south Iceland: Strain accumulation and partitioning in a propagating ridge system. Journal of Geophysical Research: Solid Earth, 110, B11405. https://doi.org/10.1029/2005JB003675

Sæmundsson, K. (1992). Geology of the Thingvallavatn area. Oikos, 64(1–2), 40–68.

Þingvellir National Park. Tectonic movements. https://www.thingvellir.is/en/education/nature/tectonic-movements/

Sound, space and acoustic heritage

Blesser, B., & Salter, L.-R. (2007). Spaces Speak, Are You Listening? Experiencing Aural Architecture. MIT Press.

Boren, B. B. (2015). Outdoor oratory and performance space. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 137(4_Supplement), 2427–2428. https://doi.org/10.1121/1.4920282

Đorđević, Z., Dragišić, M., Manzetti, M. C., & Novković, D. (2020). Digitization of acoustic heritage in a service of protection, research and promotion of European cultural heritage. In Digital Cultural Heritage (pp. 433–447). Springer.

Mattioli, T., Farina, A., Armelloni, E., Hameau, P., & Díaz-Andreu, M. (2017). Echoing landscapes: Echolocation and the placement of rock art in the Central Mediterranean. Journal of Archaeological Science, 83, 12–25.

Murphy, D., Shelley, S., Foteinou, A., Brereton, J., & Daffern, H. (2017). Acoustic heritage and audio creativity: The creative application of sound in the representation, understanding and experience of past environments.

Rindel, J. H. (2025). Acoustical aspects of the development of Greek theatres in the 4th century B.C.E. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 157(3), 2042–2066. https://doi.org/10.1121/10.0036255

Vorländer, M. (2020). Auralization: Fundamentals of Acoustics, Modelling, Simulation, Algorithms and Acoustic Virtual Reality (2nd ed.). Springer.

Zotter, F., & Frank, M. (2019). Ambisonics: A Practical 3D Audio Theory for Recording, Studio Production, Sound Reinforcement, and Virtual Reality. Springer (open access).

Tools and technical references

Cabello, R., & three.js contributors. Three.js (r161). https://threejs.org

Deppisch, T., Meyer-Kahlen, N., Hofer, B., Łatka, T., & Żernicki, T. (2020). HOAST: A higher-order Ambisonics streaming platform. 148th AES Convention, e-Brief 590. Source: https://github.com/thomasdeppisch/hoast360

Kerbl, B., Kopanas, G., Leimkühler, T., & Drettakis, G. (2023). 3D Gaussian splatting for real-time radiance field rendering. ACM Transactions on Graphics, 42(4).

Khronos Group (2021). glTF 2.0 Specification. https://registry.khronos.org/glTF/specs/2.0/glTF-2.0.html

Politis, A., & Poirier-Quinot, D. (2016). JSAmbisonics: A Web Audio library for interactive spatial sound processing on the web. Interactive Audio Systems Symposium, York.

W3C (2021). Web Audio API, W3C Recommendation, 17 June 2021. https://www.w3.org/TR/webaudio/

Author Bio

The Acoustic Heritage Collective is an independent group of artists and researchers who have collaborated for years under various names (Patrimoni Acústic, Sound Heritage Collective, Hoarfrost, Sessions Nocturnes). Their work spans sound installations, artistic residencies, music production, sound poetry, heritage preservation, and 3D/VR design, with support from Culture Moves Europe and the Government of Catalonia. Their pieces have been presented at IRCAM Centre Pompidou (France), MONOM Studios (Germany), Experimental Sound Studio Chicago (USA), Wave Farm, NY (USA) and Fundació Phonos (Spain), and their research showcased at La Sorbonne, the University of Iceland, King’s College London, the University of Kent, and Europeana.