IS VIRTUAL REALITY THE FUTURE OF MUSIC VIDEOS?
But one experience might spearhead an entirely new genre: the virtual reality music video. In “Old Friend,” creator Tyler Hurd, who cut his teeth as a video game animator, drops you into the center of a psychedelic dance circle set to Future Islands' song of the same name. As the tune’s high-pitched synth hook kicks in on your headphones, you’re confronted by an almost psychotically happy drum major who twirls his baton, lip syncs, dances like a madman, and makes it all but impossible for you not to do the same.
All around you are colorful elastic characters shaking their colorful elastic limbs with the kind of liberated abandon that’s only possible on a virtual dance floor in an imaginary universe hidden behind an actual, real-world curtain. Beyond your dance circle, big anthropomorphic mountains shake and shimmy, and every cloud smiles the instant you look at it. And, what’s this? Your own arms (which move via the HTC Vive’s controllers) are long and wavy and seem re-designed for the sole purpose of indiscriminate virtual dancing! Look down, and your feet are wiggling in uncontrollable joy. In other words, you’re not just listening to the music; you are the music.
By the time the video ends, just about everybody who exits those curtains looks like they just got a free trip to space—and when they got there it was just one giant rave, thrown in their honor.
“I modeled all the dance moves after my friends,” says Hurd. “I was like, ‘Just come over and we’ll all get wasted and make some videos!’” Once he had his material, Hurd played the videos back frame by frame and made his virtual dance troupe pull off the same moves. “Old Friend” took Hurd nine months to complete (he did all the animations and coding himself). But it was a labor of love, he says, because once he got a glimpse of what was possible with VR, the one-time 2D-only animator was hooked.
See the full story here: http://www.popsci.com/is-virtual-reality-future-music-videos