Visual Orchestra

• 

  Our idea leader enjoying the product

Inspiration

We love music and since Arvind can't play any instruments we wanted to let him know what it feels like without actually learning anything.

What it does

It shows a set of instruments and lets the user control their volume with hand movements and sharp glances at the instruments.

How we built it

Good question.

The virtual reality part is built with Unity engine and ran on an Android phone using Google Cardboard, the music was produced in different tracks by a former team member that we don't speak of anymore. Unity communicates with the leap motion through a web service, by constantly pulling data that is being posted by a JS script listening on the inputs from leap motion. If this seems off, you're right.

Challenges we ran into

The main challenge was getting the unity app communicate with the leap motion. Since' we're all pretty bad at networking and bluetooth is a deep forest we didn't dare to go into, we decided to use an intermediary for the communication, which ended up being a web service.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We made it work! It's not perfect by any means, but it works and that feels good.

What we learned

• There's always a way to make something work, even though it might not be great, but it's a good start and can be improved later.

• JSON parsing can be more difficult than it sounds

• What working with Unity engine is like

• Don't try to combine leap motion with unity on android anymore.

What's next for Visual Orchestra

• More instruments! More tracks! A live show one day.

Built With

• c#
• javascript
• love
• unity