A crazy night at the discotheque with the virtual reality app Beat Reality

Who said that the life of developers is boring? I’ve spent the last Saturday night in a real discotheque in Milan to make people try our virtual reality experience Beat Reality and I really had tons of fun.

Beat Reality is the experience that I have developed together with Enea Le Fons, the man of the #30DaysInVR initiative. He is super-fond of music and so proposed to do together this mixed reality application for the Vive Focus, that lets you see your real world beating following the rhythm of your favorite music. It’s fantastic because it lets you enjoy music everywhere as if you were inside a dancefloor, with fancy colors beating… and you can also shoot photos and GIFs from inside it. It’s a new way of enjoying music. We had fun developing it and we also got very positive feedback (it currently has a 4.8/5 score on Viveport M).

But for Enea this was not enough, so he had this idea: “if the app can make people enjoy music in a new way, why don’t we take it in a place where people go to enjoy music, that is a real discotheque?” The idea was crazy enough that we all immediately said yes.

So, last Saturday night we all went to the Apollo Club in Milan (Italy), to participate in the RRRiot night, a clubbing event that is slightly exclusive and is attended by creative people. We decided to really test the application in the wild, so we did not warn the attendees about our initiative. The organizers of the event, of course, had been informed and were very happy to feature such an original thing inside the experience they offered. They also helped us in finding a girl that could help us in approaching people and making them try virtual reality.

We started showcasing our app to this girl, called Michela, that hadn’t ever tried mixed reality in her life before. She immediately loved the experience but had some problems in moving in space with the headset on and the app running, because she had issues in orientating with the pulsing mode on. While she was trying the experience, all the workers of the club got curious about this friend of theirs that had this strange thing in front of her eyes and was walking and dancing. So, barmen, hostesses, and bouncers started asking her to try Beat Reality as well. Even the first customers of the club wanted to try it. A lot of people were attracted to VR and all found the experience super-interesting.

At 1.00am, when the real event started and the disco was full of people, we went on the dance floor and started dancing with the headsets on. At the turn, one of us put the headset on and started dancing, while the other ones just had fun or shot videos. Then, after a while, that person passed the headset on to another one of us, and so on until the end of the night. When people approached us to ask what we were doing with that thing on our head, we made them try Beat Reality… and we went on like that until 3.30 am. Actually, Enea remained for more time and made other people try Beat Reality until morning (that guy has an infinite reserve of energy!). It has been a very original and funny night!

What have I learned during this crazy disco night?

1. People are curious about virtual reality and are not afraid of it. A lot of people approached us with curiosity, asking us “what are you seeing inside?”, “what is this?”, “can I try it?”. I thought that they could be scared by the headset, but actually, they were only curious to try something new and we got really lots of requests of people wanting to try the device. And consider that we were not at the center of the dancefloor, but on one side of it, and we got anyway tons of requests. Some people even already knew what virtual reality was and so found natural the idea of trying a VR headset;
2. People do not know mixed reality. As I said, some people knew about virtual reality and expected to see a 3D environment inside the VR headset. As soon as they saw a modification of reality, they were really astonished. It was something unexpected for everyone. So, while awareness for virtual reality is rising, the one for mixed reality is still low. And from what I saw, people like mixed reality a lot;
3. People in the club love Beat Reality. I know, I am the developer of the app, so you probably won’t trust me as a reliable source. But I can assure you that I myself was surprised to see their reactions. Most people got in a complete awe when they started seeing all the environment around them made of beating colored edges or made of big pulsating pixels. I got people saying things like “I want to buy it. How can I have it?”, “I want to live inside here forever”, “It is the best thing ever that I tried”, “It’s fantastic”, and so on. I expected positive feedbacks, I got instead a lot of enthusiasm. Pure and sincere enthusiasm, that I could clearly see in the light in their eyes while they were talking with me. Of course, I know, the drinks (and maybe also something else) that these people had during the night helped in making them happy. Anyway, this test showed that virtual reality in clubbing has enormous potential;https://gfycat.com/FailingCloudyCivet
4. Given the previous point, I got the recipe to make Virtual Reality widespread: make all people drunk 😀
5. Someone reported that the experience is like having an acid trip. Well, this means that in some contexts, Virtual Reality could replace drugs… for a recreational experience that doesn’t harm the health. If virtual reality manages to do something like that, it could help the world in becoming a better place;
6. Some people reported dizziness when trying it for a long time: this is because the MR mode on the Focus is still a hack we found ourselves (it is not an official solution) and so it has still some issues. If framerate is not perfect and the camera feed is not perfectly undistorted, people not used to VR may have some little side effects;
7. Beat Reality can help in meeting girls: I got to know lots of girls that were curious to try Beat Reality and had fun dancing with them. The Vive Focus can be the new tool to transform every man in a Casanova 😀 . Of course I don’t forget about you Women in VR: I got to know a lot of cool guys, too… so it is a great tool for you, too!
8. The people were confused by how the remote should be used: of course they were not interested in tutorials and explanations, they just wanted to put the headset on and have fun… and this gave me little opportunity to explain them how to use the app. In the end, I resorted to putting the headset on their heads, but keeping the remote for myself, with which I switched the various visualization mode to let them try the whole app. Maybe for this completely crazy environment, a less interactive and more immediate app with a gallery of automatic changing effects is better than offering a manual mode;
9. The audio management has to be improved to take in count different environmental conditions: when the music was too high, there was no beating anymore because the volume was always at maximum;

10. The Vive Focus 6 DOF tracking (that is based on RGB cameras) performs terribly in the disco. Since the disco is very dark, the tracking doesn’t work and this is an issue because the visuals get obscured with a “Tracking Lost” error. We solved the issue in two different ways:
    • On Enea’s headset, we activated the “passenger mode”, that is a modality that transforms the Focus in a 3 DOF device (like the Oculus Go). This means that the tracking gets disabled and so there are never showcased tracking errors. Notice that the lack of positional tracking did not ruin the experience because the experience shows the camera feed and when you move, the feed of the cameras changes… so basically there is no need of a positional tracking to have coherent visuals;
    • On my headset, since Max had also to shoot videos, I made the human-lamp and I used the super powerful flashlight mode of my HTC U12+ to illuminate the dancing people while Max framed everything with his Samsung phone. The flashlight provided enough light to let the 6 DOF tracking work, while at the same time let us shoot good videos. This had also the additional positive effect that the person dancing with VR on was the only one lit in the dark environment of the disco, and this made him/her more noticeable, attracting the interest of even more people. Of course, the “human flashlight” role that I had to sustain was not amazing, so something automated (like a fancy LED strip attached to the USB-C port of the headset) has to be implemented.
11. The Vive Focus battery management is good: after 2 hours and a half of intermittent usage of Beat Reality, we still had half of the battery charge remaining!

A lot of lessons for only one night of testing. A lot of things to work on for our future updates. The coolest thing has been having fun with my friends and at the same time having great professional satisfaction in seeing lots of people in awe because of our app. After the night on the Dancefloor, Enea has also managed to make the emerging trap singer Chadia Rodriguez sing a part of her latest hit “Pastiglie” inside the Vive Focus with Beat Reality on. Wow!

As you can see, being a virtual reality developer is damn hard and boring… 😉