Full Bloom: A novel diegetic user interface for musical phrases in virtual reality

We propose a novel system for communicating musical note pitch and sequence information to users within a virtual reality environment. Our approach utilizes ‘Blooms,’ objects that resemble flowers with various petal arrangements. These formations, when constructed in view of users, act as diegetic, user-parsable encodings of their inputs. Blooms exist within the virtual space as simulated physics objects. Collectively, Blooms serve the role of a user interface for interacting with various musical phrases.

00:42 - Full Bloom is a virtual reality experience built using Unity that utilizes positionally-tracked hand controllers. With these controllers, we enable users to strike handheld mallets to a virtual drumkit. Each colored flowerpot in the drumkit corresponds to a different variety of Bloom petal and plays a unique percussive audio sample when struck. Striking a drumkit flowerpot also adds its corresponding petal to whichever Bloom rests in the center of this conveyor belt machine. Petals are encoded clockwise within the Bloom.

01:14 - The machine waits ten seconds for note input before dispensing this Bloom within the user’s playspace. This graphic depicts a variety of Blooms and the types of musical phrases encoded within each petal arrangement. Striking the base of each Bloom replays the associated phrase. The dimensional presence of Blooms transforms Bloom construction into a matter of user-directed aesthetics. Thank you! .