In Pursuit of Repetitive Beats takes audiences on a multi-sensory joyride into the past, bringing to life the stories of the promoters, police officers, and rave-goers, whose rivalries and relationships drove a revolution in music and society. Multi-sensory room-scale interactive VR enables participants to feel the anticipation, trepidation, excitement, and euphoria that was Acid House.
The proejct directed by Darren Emerson and produced by East City Films and BPM XR LTD, it is supported by the BFI, awarding National Lottery funding, and Coventry City of Culture Trust.
This is a project I am involved in late 2021 to early 2022. I have to say this is one of my favourite VR projects I’ve worked on so far. I was mainly responsible with the development of the player VR interaction part within the project.
Generally, I hate 360° videos, especially when it's called a VR project. The linear narrative with poor picture quality and lack of interaction is what I hate the most.But in this project, 360° video is well integrated - as cutscenes. it doesn't need to be interactive, not even much of a narrative, but just as a transition between different scenes. And the poooooor picture quality presents the 80s rave scene perfectly. I love it.
Post this here for recording some of the ideas for gesture tracking that I got from this project.
It’s a Unity project and base on Oculus Quest. I have used a plugin called HPTK. It’s a nice plugin to simulate hand physics. If you have no idea about physics in hand tracking, it would be good to check Hand Physic Lab. The best VR hand tracking project I have seen.
I don’t know how Hand Physic Lab achieves hand physics but in HPTK, it’s kind of like a puppet system. We have two “master hands” driven by oculus hand tracking provider, they are same as original oculus hand tracking things, no physics here. And two “puppet hands”, driven by master hands. Actually, other physic hand tracking plugin did the same thing as this, like Auto Hand – it’s a good plugin too – but it only tracking fingers curl angle and apply to puppet hands. So it looks like a robot hand not a human.