Between the Mountain and the Sea

Between the Mountain and the Sea

People have always tried to visualize music, whether it’s a music video or a computer-generated visualizer. Through this project, I hoped to combine these concepts together to produce a new way of experiencing music. Combining both the audio and visual senses to produce a unique experience only made possible through Virtual Reality. 

For my artefact I made a Virtual Reality Music Experience. This involves the viewer listening to music while the world moves around them. The animations and themes of the world will be uniquely linked to the song and its lyrics. This is a fully passive experience requiring no inputs from the viewer.

statement of intent

The Development Process

The development process began with me creating a music visualiser within unity. After doing this, I had the scripts required in order to make objects react perfectly in time to the music on 8 different bands. After doing this, I found the music I wanted to use which was created by my friend Archie Johnson. 

Next, I started to prototype different scene transitions whilst trying to limit VR Sickness. At first this went horribly as I tested them out on multiple people who all reported they felt nauseous after testing. After this I began to research into the ways to alleviate VR Sickness and I found that one of the best ways was to use rest frames.

Rest frames are elements of a world that remain stationary in order to keep the player grounded. They work by enabling your brain to perceive being still, while elements around the stationary object can move freely. I implemented this into my experience by making sure that there is always at least 1 large stationary object, whether it’s the floor or walls. This worked brilliantly and removed all reports of motion sickness after further user testing.

One challenge I found during development was that I had inadvertently chosen a rather long song. This meant that my development time was much longer as I had to manually animate many of the elements throughout the song. Also, that in order to test a section of the song, I had to play the entire song up to that section first. This also increased my development time substantially.

As a VR Designer and not an artist, I struggled to produce the art needed for my experience. In order to alleviate this, I simply used Probuilder as well as downloaded free textures and assets that I required.

Full VR Music Experience

Thank you for reading through my development process, I hope you have a great day!