Harmonix Music Systems has created a Harmonix Music VR app as an exclusive for the Sony PlayStation VR virtual reality headset arriving this October. It’s something that hippies would love as it’s a psychedelic trip set to the tune of your favorite music. Yes, it might be possible for your VR headset to give you a transcendental experience.
We recently played a demo of the app — which runs on a game console but can’t really be called a game — for a hands-on experience. It was kind of groovy, just like the old music visualizers were on the original Xbox game console. (Yes, we’re old enough to remember that.) It is pretty clear that crazy and weird visuals are even more crazy and weird when you’re viewing the on a VR headset.
As I put on the headset, the fellow next to me who was also trying it out said, “Whoa, this is super f****** weird.”
I started out on a beach on an alien planet. I walked up to a flower as the music was playing, and I saw it start to open. The experience has four different VR scenes where you can sit back and enjoy the experience. The beach scene was good for meditation.
“It’s a collection of four unique worlds that all let you use virtual reality to facilitate musical immersion and appreciation,” said Jon Carter, the game designer at Harmonix, in an interview with GamesBeat. “Or it’s a VR music visualizer, if you want a simpler way to think about it.”
The next was a pure hippie experience, called The Trip. All you do in that one is sit back and look around as a bunch of kaleidoscopes come racing at your face. It’s like music visualizer heaven. It feels like you’re riding a colorful rollercoaster.
In the third experience, I joined a party scene. It had some funny-looking 3D characters. I walked up to them and grabbed them and made their limbs move. Then you hit play and all of the characters start moving at once to the music, doing the dance moves that you have choreographed for them.
The final world is like another app altogether. You can sculpt things in the world while listening to your music. Harmonix Music VR works with any song in your PlayStation music library, or you can plug in a USB flash drive with your own music.
“There’s an angle where a lot of visual artists will listen to music while they work,” Carter said. “There’s something about getting that creative frame of mind that makes you more receptive to music. It’s interesting for us to give you something to do creatively that also refers back to the music itself. Ideally, we create this zoned-out feedback loop of engagement.”
The whole demo lasted about 12 minutes. I’m not really sure how long I would spend in this kind of experience. But if you feel like de-stressing, it might be just the thing you’re looking for.
“It’s an experience. It’s not a game,” Carter said. “The idea is that the replayability comes from the different ways that the worlds react to different music. It works with every song in the world. We encourage people to experiment with different types of songs in the different worlds.”
The experience debuts in October with the launch of the PSVR.
