meta-meta
I am struggling a bit with this explanation though:
> ZenithTrack shows a strip of the sky, a thin ribbon, one rice-grain tall, about 2,500 rice-grains long.
What does it mean to say "one rice-grain tall"? Is that angular diameter at arm's length?
I've been stuck waiting for Meta to verify my identity. Shortly after that happens, it'll be available on the Quest store.
edit: ah, it's because it is a plugin for Unity's audio system which I've already determined adds more latency than I want.
I've been developing a VR spatial sound and music app for a few years with the Unity game engine, bypassing the game engine's audio and instead remote controlling Ambisonic VSTs in REAPER. I can achieve low latency with that approach but it's a bit limited because all the tracks and routing need to be setup beforehand. There's probably a way to script it on REAPER but that sounds like an uphill battle. It would be a lot more natural to interface with an audio backend that is organized in terms of audio objects in space.
What I'd like is more flexibility to create and destroy objects on the fly. The VSTs I'm working with don't have any sort of occlusion either. That would be really nice to play with. Meta has released a baked audio raytracing solution for Quest, and that's fun for some situations but the latency is a bit too much for a satisfying virtual instrument.
Here's my project for context: https://musicality.computer/vr
edit: here's the article that prompted me to reflect on this https://nrkbeta.no/2018/01/01/this-is-what-the-year-actually...
Musicbee https://www.getmusicbee.com/ was kinda promising for a while but bloated and clunky.
VLC and Foobar get the job done but the UI is meh.
Streaming and iTunes really wrecked everything.
https://www.youtube.com/live/v4uHqdTr-bs?feature=share&t=426...
There are a few simple but powerful building blocks. One main feature is an egg shaped "note" which can be placed, resized, retuned and cloned on the fly. It's played by physics interactions with a "mallet" or sports balls, anything with a collider.
One of the instruments is a sine wave organ which has drawbars to control the amplitude of overtones. Unlike a classic organ, these overtones can be independently retuned and assigned envelopes to produce a range of timbres. Pitch is consistently mapped to a spiral - an isomorphism of pitch space.
It has a theremin which provides visual and tactile feedback and a voice with vocal formants controllable with a thumbstick.
It has a physics based sequencer of sorts which consists of "mallets" on a wheel which spins at a desired ratio of whatever BPM is set in a DAW. These wheels can be cloned and multiple mallets arranged around the circle using the Euclidean rhythm algorithm.
Since low latency audio in Unity is tricky, the VR app is really just a controller for synthesizers running in Max/MSP and IEM spatial audio VSTs running in REAPER. One day I'd like to package some portion of it into a mobile VR app for things like remote jamming or music lessons where models of the theoretic ideas are right there in front of us to tinker with. For now, it's just for me.