Today Unello Design is taking wraps off of a cool experimental Oculus Rift demo that continues the studio’s trend of blissful experiences. Opera Nova is a short but sweet demo which combines music and visuals in an experience that’s compatible with the Oculus Rift DK2.
Aaron Lemke, founder of indie VR studio Unello Design, went right to work after Oculus VR released the latest Oculus SDK 0.4.0 beta, updating for the Oculus Rift DK2 a project he’s kept under wraps for some time. Opera Nova is a short experiment in 3D audio and accompanying visuals.
Lemke, the creator of the soon-to-be-released Eden River HD, has a history of creating peaceful/meditative virtual reality experiences which have a heavy emphasis on audio design. Opera Nova is the first time Lemke has implemented 3D audio in a VR experience available to the public. He’s been testing several different Unity plugins for this purpose. The current version of Opera Nova uses the 3Dception binaural audio plugin from Two Big Ears.
The game combines an original audio track with the 3D audio plugin and leverages a number of interesting particle effects to give visual form to each note. You start in a nondescript landscape as the music starts up around you. Each instrument that contributes to the song is represented visually around the player. Approaching the ‘instruments,’ if you will, brings their individual sound front and center. It really feels like the notes are eminating from the visual effects in front of you—like the sound exists within a 3D space.
The game enables players to essentially choose their own experience when it comes to the music. Do you want to focus on the bubbly treble notes or perhaps the dub-steppy (yes, I just wrote that) bass line on the far right? By adding both visual and spatial elements to each note, Lemke has nearly turned them into tangible objects. The effect is very cool and I can’t wait to see the concept expanded. Road to VR Editor Paul James, called it “hypnotic.”
I asked Lemke about his experience with the Oculus Rift DK2 so far.
“Updating was a fairly easy process. However I usually work on Mac and the Mac SDK is not out yet, so I had to migrate the whole project to Windows. That was kind of a pain,” he told me. “The DK2 is very slick. The first thing I powered up was the Oculus world demo. This demo lets you visualize the camera volume. What i didn’t expect was how large the volume is. You could actually have a really solid standing VR experience if you aim the camera up a bit and move your desk chair out of the way. Seeing the size and the accuracy of this capture volume definitely got my creative juices flowing… can’t wait to start experimenting.”
Lemke is making the Opera Nova demo immoderately available to anyone who pre-orders his forthcoming title, Eden River HD, which is due out on August 8th and will also be compatible with the DK2, says Lemke. The Opera Nova demo is Windows-only for now, until the Oculus SDK is available for Mac. It also supports the ‘Direct HMD Access’ mode, making it extremely easy to use with the Oculus Rift DK2. Lemke plans to flesh out Opera Nova into a full experience down the road.
