Virtualability

Quest VR System, Unity, Cycling '74's Max, Symbolic Sound's Kyma

Virtualability strives to cross the inherent internal/external boundaries of a virtual reality environment. The experience of a virtual reality device can often be inspiring and provocative, but is frequently limited to an audience of one, and shared only with others utilizing a similar device. This piece is an attempt to shift this experience into the context of a staged musical performance, providing a shared experience between the performer and audience in the visual and auditory domains.

A Unity-built standalone application was created as an interactive visual component to the piece, projected behind or in line with the performer. Data streams produced by the Quest interface are sent as OSC messages to Max and then passed to Unity, engaging algorithmically generated visuals. Data streams produced by the visual component are also sent as OSC messages via ethernet first to Max and then to Kyma, to be scaled and mapped to musical parameters.

One great advantage of using an immersive headset as part of a musical instrument interface is the opportunity it provides in discretely communicating valuable performance instructions throughout a performance. For this piece, I created a virtual environment program with Unity to run on the Quest headset, which provides visual feedback to the performer. This virtual space takes the form of a three-meter cube-shaped room. On one wall of this room, text relating to connectivity information is displayed for reference when setting up the instrument. The main forward-facing wall presents information related to connectivity to the instrument, timing information, and score instruction. Throughout the performance of the piece, these mutable modules of the visual feedback system provide timely information on interaction with the interface’s inputs as well as representations of interactive objects in the visual component projected to the audience.