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 | 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 |
Learn Harmonica faster
Read more @ http://harpninja.com
