Musicality

Inspiration

The Musicality team was seeking to build a hack where people of all ages and experience levels could find musical expression through intuitive interactions and gestures together, and wanted to explore how we might deepen dimensions of presence through augmented virtuality and co-located play.

Here are some projects that influenced our ideation:

Charles Long & Stereolab: Musical Sculpture link

Bjork: Biophilia link

Music Viz link

What it does

In Musicality, users can make music together or solo by grabbing balloons and manipulating them through space to change pitch, tone, and harmony.

How we built it

After ideating in Miro, we began prototyping in ShapesXR, making objects in Blender, creating audio assets in Ableton, setting up the Foundry multiplayer platform in Unity, and then launching a local network to support the experience. We had a lot of trouble shooting but got to a prototype and then fine tuned the interactive variables.

Challenges we ran into

We encountered numerous obstacles dealing with each of the SDK's we were developing from, as they were all brand new and barely been built on (especially not for our specific use case for networked XR in passthrough), and so we were pushed to make several modifications to the code for everything to work.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Not only had we achieved the networked functionality for two Vive XR Elite Pro devices for co-located play in pass-through, but we turned the constraint of our limited access to those devices into another affordance for co-present multiplayer functionality, as this drove us to build to Quest 2's during our graveyard shifts.