Self Commission: Orbeat
A Fun And Collaborative Musical Instrument In Augmented Reality
OrBeat is an augmented reality sequencer built for fun and
collaborative music composition. Choose your sounds, place them in
space, and listen back to your tracks in real-time!
Augmented music. Together.
We have been experimenting with spatial sound for a long time and we
have previously released an app, Our app
Aero One
was already a musical playground in augmented reality. With OrBeat we
wanted to take the concept further and enable collaborative
music-making. As usual, we added a sprinkle of surprise and magic!
To come up with a distinct look for our world of sound, we made
several iterations as 3D pre-visualizations before settling on the
final design. One of the main design challenges was to give each
instrument its own distinct visual identity and behavior so that users
could remember them, while at the same time keeping the shapes
abstract to create a sense of discovery and playfulness.
We always like to share our experiments with the larger public, so
that we can collectively reimagine the interactions between humans and
emerging technologies.
Orbeat was first presented at the Retune Digital Arts Lab as part of
the Hub.Berlin conference in 2019 where it was a real crowd-pleaser.
Download and play!
And now you can try it yourself! You can download Orbeat for
iOS
or
Android. If you notice any bugs or glitches, please let us know at
hello@neu.io.