VR Rehearse & Perform

Extended Reality, Virtual Reality, Musicians, Performances, Research, Digital Arts




The acoustic and visual experiences of musicians in the spaces they perform in are complex and organic in nature, entailing a continuous interaction with the environment. With this project, we leveraged the power of Virtual Reality to support musicians in their creative practice by transporting them to novel sonic and visual worlds.

For this, we developed a musician-centred VR system, featuring various acoustic and visual virtual environments, VR Rehearse & Perform, based on design requirements gathered with musicians and performance experts. To investigate how VR can be designed to support music-makers in their creative musical practice, we performed iterative tests with 19 musicians followed by semi-structured interviews.

Our fndings suggest that VR has the potential to support diferent aspects of the creative musical practice, such as rehearsing, performing and improvising. Our research provides insights and inspirations toward designing musician-centred VR experiences for various musical activities.

This project was presented as a Full paper and demo at ACM CHI 2022 and as a Demo/ Poster at VRST 2021.



Year: 2022
Collaborators: Alexandra Covaci, Boyd Branch, University of Arts London Creative Computing Institute, Innovation Consultancy, Royal College of music
Role: Project conception, VR Development, User testing, Research outputs
Location: Canterbury
Duration: 1 year
Skills used: User research, Interviews, Co-creation, Iterative design, Prototyping, Stakeholder engagement
Tools used: Unity 3D, 3DTi toolkit, Autodesk Maya, Adobe After Effects, Adobe Premiere Pro, Oculus Quest
Links:
CHI 2022 Paper
VRST 2021 Short Paper Software website


The process



The software



User testing