by Paul Cohen | Sep 10, 2017 |
Inside Music is a Google WebVR Experiment that lets you step inside a song, giving you a closer look at how music is made. The bonus is the music is spatialized as well so you get a completely different audio experience from a normal stereo mix.
Open the Song Visualizer in a new tab: https://sonicviz.gitlab.io/sonicviz-spatial-music/
You can move around using the WASD keys and mouse, just like a regular game controller mode.
Note: Best used with Google Chrome browser with no other tabs open.
“Interaction
Select a song from the menu. The stems of the song will appear in a circle around you, each represented by a sphere. In 360 Mode, tap the spheres to turn them on or off. In VR Mode, you can use your controller to toggle their state. On Google Cardboard, you will have a retical (a small circle in front of you eye) which can be used to turn the stems on and off.”
I thought it would be a good opportunity to pull apart and test it with a couple of my own songs:
There’s huge potential with spatial music to revolutionize music production and delivery, and we’re only just getting started. For some more info on this you can read my blog post on “Immersive Audio and Musical AI“.
There’s a bit of a process to go through, including configuring your development workflow and tools but in the end it’s a pretty cool way of getting inside the music. I also used it as an opportunity to test gitlab CI and page hosting.
Next step will be to extend it with some custom visualizations, refine the asset pipeline workflow. I’ve actually had a similar concept bouncing around to do in Unity3D so I’ll probably do that at some point.
See also: https://www.canvas.co.com/creations/3901
by Paul Cohen | Mar 10, 2017 |
Learn how to successfully transform your business with digital technologies.
I produced a video course on Digital Strategy for Small to Medium Business Owners.
Access it here on Udemy (highly rated): https://www.udemy.com/quickstart-digital-strategy/
You can also read my blog post on Quickstart Digital Strategy
by Paul Cohen | Jan 30, 2017 |
Client project for an art gallery in person experience and also online via desktop or iPad.
It uses WebGL to display a 3D model of a snapdragon flower, which users can animate through voice recognition of the word “SnapDragon”.
Deployed through different server configurations, including Heroku and GitHub pages.
by Paul Cohen | Aug 4, 2016 |
Orbon is a collaborative game development learning project with my 6 yr old son Oscar.
(You can read more about his game based learning adventures here: http://www.coplay.ninja/ )
Orbon ™ is an endless play experience designed to test your thinking and reactions, that requires focused concentration and timing.
It’s currently in open alpha testing phase on Google Play, coming soon to iOS.
https://play.google.com/apps/testing/com.sonicviz.orbon
App page: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.sonicviz.orbon
Technology: Unity
Team: Me and my 6 year old son as co-designer
Process: It started out as a small project I put together to test some Affective AI plugins I was evaluating for client projects. Affective AI is software that responds to the users emotional state through different sensors and emotive state pattern detection.
While testing these out I thought of a side project to do some game development with my son, to show him a little of the process of development and engage him in some high level design and play testing. We talk a lot doing that so it’s great for his english skills too;-)
The goal was to develop something fun but quickly with high quality art, music, and sound. We developed the core mechanic first (the toy) then built some gameplay around it with a little story backdrop. Art style I was originally looking to do something quite abstract but we took a U-turn into the current style instead. I spent a bit of time choosing the music and sound FX as this is a key part of the experience as well.
I heavily leveraged the Unity Asset store for some key subsystems and art, most of which I already had. It was very much an iterative process to explore what might work, then implement and test. Total project length was ~4 weeks.
It’s quite a complex little game under the hood. I surfaced a few gnarly bugs in some of the 3rd party subsystems I used, so that involved some back and forth with the devs. Fortunately I chose packages wisely and these were all great devs who support their products really well.
I decided to release it into the wild for some early alpha testing to tune the gameplay, difficulty progression, and pacing with some more inputs from a wider audience.
Feel free to have a play and let us know your thoughts!
by Paul Cohen | May 1, 2016 |
Pilot program with English Learning Kinder in Tokyo for an early childhood creativity & cognitive skills development program.
Tools: Visual programming apps such as Scratch Jr, Kodable, Kiko Labs etc
See http://www.firstlearning-yoyogiuehara.com/program/technology/
