VJVR is an interactive VR installation that allows you to control audioreactive visuals that surround you (skybox) with buttons and levers. There's also a few button pads to control music samples, so you can generate the music that triggers the audioreactiveness of the visuals, and a very rudimentary piano and drums. The experience has no beggining or end, you can try every possible combination of effects and values for a lot of different results.
Now i'll go back a few steps. at first this project was just a way to see the visuals made on processing (this is a branch project from this) inside a VR enviroment. For that i used spout to send the texture from processing into unity, where i applied it on a sphere with inverted normals, acting as a skybox.
I decided that the users of the app should have a way to not just look, but modify the visuals themselves within the VR app, so i "ported" (for the lack of a better word) many of the controls on the touchOSC layout i had on my phone to Unity. For that i 3D modelled some basic levers and buttons, and coded a little to connect their movement/state with OSC messages, the same used by touchOSC when i did live VJing. Now the users had ways to modify the effects, it's colors, feedback, etc. (i can still control things thru my phone if needed, as those controls don't override the others)
The visuals are audioreactive, so... where should that sound come from? there's always the chance of putting some music on, but i thought it would be nice to be able to somehow make the music inside the enviroment too, so i added a few loop rythms i've edited myself on Ableton, and since i had the interactions already coded, i threw in some crappy drums and a piano. It doesn't sound that great, but keep in mind i'm not a musican..
There's the chance to hide all the controls and simply sit and enjoy the visuals around you.
I'm thinking of implementing some new features like a "panic button" that takes you away from seizure inducing configurations into a few preset ones that look good, and maybe also changing the buttons and levers for a more artsy and vague approach at controlling the visuals, (like gestures with the joysticks, or some fancy joystick touchpad interface) although that would require reducing the variables even further since gestures are a very non-precise way to control values, and the joysticks only have so many buttons, and i have countless of variables to be tinkered with.
I've shown this publicly a bunch of times.
Twice at UNTREF, my university. On a very "under" VR venue in called "VRI". On the french-argentinian VR event "Virtuality" during quarentine, and on "Festival Emergente", a venue organized by "Gobierno de la ciudad de buenos aires" that lasted 3 days
The video below is a 360 video of just the visuals around you for a few minutes, no controls. If you have a VR headset to watch the video, that's as close as experiencing this as you'll get for now! For a more "gameplayish" video, check the one on top of this.. article?
