by Paul Cohen | Dec 2, 2017 |
by Paul Cohen | Nov 15, 2017 |
What is Wings?
Wings is a Therapeutic VR prototype with interactive music and procedural visuals/camera.
The environment (time of day, speed, cloud cover etc) + adaptive music score (high quality emotive orchestral cinematic) is driven by AI or responsive to bio/neuro feedback.
Update 2018-01-09: Selected by Microsoft for the Windows Mixed Reality Developer Program .
I did a talk about the development approach at VR Hub Tokyo Year-End Meetup Vol.4 | Health & Fitness with VR and AR titled “Design Framework for a Therapeutic VR app”.
What is Therapeutic VR?
It’s using VR in a variety of therapeutic contexts to achieve increased efficacy of targeted treatment protocols for areas such as:
- Pain Management
- PTSD
- Stress Reduction
- Exposure Therapy
- Rehabilitation and Physical Therapy
- ++
Watch some examples at https://www.virtualmedicine.health/videos
Related projects are:
Some video from the presentation:
VR app test version video:
by Paul Cohen | Oct 6, 2017 |
Groove Pilot is a unique immersive and interactive spatial music experience for both desktop and VR.
Check the website out here: https://groovepilot.ninja/
As part of my continuing series of explorations around spatial music I threw together this prototype to play with some ideas about:
- Spatial music
- Real-time mixing
- Interaction
Groove Pilot
How to play?
- You must use headphones or earbuds to experience the spatial music
- Collect all 14 sound orbs to complete the level.
- Collect each sound orb before you run out of fuel.
- Each one collected will give you a bonus fuel boost as well
- As you collect each sound orb it enables another layer of the downtempo chill music track to play.
- Each layer of music is located in 3D space so is mixed relative to all the others as you move around, dynamically changing the music mix and experience on the fly.
- In a sense it’s a generative music piece controlled by the players movement through 3D space.
- Each sound orb/music track/stem is also visualized procedurally in different ways with real time signal processing to drive reactive graphics.
- Note: Sound visualization currently only works on desktop version, working on a fix for the WebGL browser version.
- Best used with an XBox360 type controller to fly.
- Left Stick: Pitch/Yaw
- Triggers: Roll
- Button A: Start/Brakes
Try it out: https://groovepilot.netlify.com Note: This is WebGL and best used in Chrome/Firefox with minimal tabs open.
Research and Development
I did a talk about the development approach at VR Hub Tokyo Year-End Meetup Vol.4 | Health & Fitness with VR and AR titled “Design Framework for a Therapeutic VR app”.
Related projects are:
Sound/Music R&D
Web playable non-vr prototype submitted as part of Procjam 2017 @ https://itch.io/jam/procjam/rate/194089
Technical details.
Built in Unity 3D. Desktop only as Unity WebGL is currently not supported on mobiles.
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
