Month: July 2016

How about this U2 video? This is spatialized although the mix is kind of strange. Bono is right next to me but there’s all this reverb on his voice, which doesn’t match the expected reverb from the arena they are in. There are cool transitions into the different people singing and spatialization was pretty good. I was pretty impressed with this video.

Now I’m going to look at Squarepusher ” “Stor Eiglass”. I’m kind of excited about this. I haven’t even watched this on the iPad, but Squarepusher always does some really interesting things. This is visually really cool. It’s a very bright, primary color, cartoonish, candy sort of like Problem Solverz. Damn it! The music is just stereo. Another fail.

VRSE (Now called Within)

The next thing I want look at is called “Evolution of Verse” which is something I show people a lot on the iPad. I love this film. It’s completely animated and is a cooler experience in the Gear, but looks better on the iPad. The one thing that was depressing was that the sound is just not localized at all and given that it’s a linear thing, I’m surprised that it wasn’t done. That said, it’s still not a bad experiences.

VRSE (now called Within)

VRSE is also another app that I’m familiar with from my iPad and the first thing that I watched was the first thing that I watched on iPad, which was called “Walking in New York”. It’s a documentary about a photograph for the New York Times that JR had made. It was cool to see it in Gear, although the resolution wasn’t as good as the iPad but at least I felt like I was really there.

I knew this interview had been shot with binaural sound but after the studio interview, the voice over came in and was not spatialized. I was thinking that they should have had the binaural audio through the whole thing and just mix the voice over on top. They didn’t do that so it was a bit distracting.

AltspaceVR

I am familiar with AltspaceVR from a desktop version. I attended a couple comedy shows in the desktop and really enjoyed the spatialization of the audio although when somebody next to you is laughing really loud it’s sometimes hard to hear the talent. I think we need a plug-in or some way of disabling spatialization when there’s a performance so that the performers audio feed is sent directly to each headset.

Another thing that is a sort of frustrating is that I don’t always have my headphones that have a microphone. When you are in a Hangout or Welcome Space and someone comes up to talk to you, you can’t tell him or her that you can’t speak. I wish there was a text function with generic phrases that I could send them.

One thing that was fun in the Welcome Space was a globe that showed where everyone was from that is in the room at that time. You can also access a menu that shows you everyone that is in Altspace and what room they are in. So if you meet someone one time, you can find him or her again.

I decided to check out the Tumblr Gallery. This is pretty cool because you can curate your own gallery presentation. The space itself has some interesting spatial audio treats. There is a fireplace with the sound of the fire and it’s localized in that it fades away when you walk away. There was another person in the room that asked me if I could hear the clock ticking when near a particular image. I did hear it, but we couldn’t figure out where the source was.

There are lots of other treats like this. In the “Let’s Hang Out” room, if you go over to one corner by the couch you hear the buzz of the lamp. In the jungle maze, there is a location recording of jungle sounds and crickets that was pretty cool.

In general Altspace is really fun and a great way to meet new people and they have special events all the time. Very fun app and the Gear makes it even more fun.