Virtual Reality: The future of music tech in 2023

Today’s music streaming services, like Spotify, focus on the listening habits of the individual to drive user engagement. Song selections, albums, and playlists are all curated towards YOU based on your previous listening habits. This encourages you to treat music as a personal experience, something that entertains you in isolation.

This is where VR has the potential to offer something incredible to music tech: social experience.

You’d be forgiven for thinking that VR itself is an isolating technology. The truth is, VR has the potential to be an extremely social platform, allowing users to connect, interact, and share experiences with each other from anywhere in the world.

Voice, body language, and interaction help users to feel the presence of other people, making them feel like they’re together and that they’re occupying the same space, regardless of where they are in the real world.

Adding social to the VR concert experience means that it becomes something you do with people — something you do with your friends. When you’re with people you’re more likely to have a profound experience and develop richer memories. These will become memories that you and your friends will talk about for years as something that actually happened: “Remember that time we saw Daft Punk in Virtual Reality?”

On a grander level, there’s something about being part of a crowd at a concert that gives you a powerful sense of unity. Being one in a crowd of people vibing and dancing in sync, heightens the elation you feel when listening to live music. You feel like you’re a part of something larger than yourself, which is an awesome feeling. VR could be the tool that allows people from around the world to come together and unify, by experiencing the same music together.

Gamifying dance

Audioshield first look, VR mixed-reality

It’s like Guitar Hero, but re-imagined for Virtual Reality.

This is how I often describe Audioshield, a VR rhythm game that has you blocking incoming orbs to the beat of a song.

Here’s Dylan Fitterer, the game’s creator:

“Brandon Laatsch (Hover Junkers, Duck Season) had an idea that music works so well in VR because it can synchronize three senses: sight, sound, and touch. I think he’s onto something there. VR’s main strength as a new medium is accurate body inputs, so any game that leans into that is on the right track,” says Dylan.

Accurate body inputs are at the crux of what makes this game fun. The orbs are flying towards the player to the beat of the song and instinctively the player defends themselves with their handheld shields. Through playing the game, the user has been encouraged to move their body to the beat of the music. They’ve been tricked into dancing. You could say that Audioshield gamifies dance.

Once the player is dancing (whether they’re aware of it or not), they’re almost guaranteed to have a good time. The movement of dance encourages the release of feel-good hormones, which makes the player feel elated.

It’s no wonder that rhythm-based experiences like Audioshield and SoundBoxing are some of my most regularly returned to VR games.

TheWaveVR also utilises the gamification of dance through the use of ‘challenges’ — simple but effective tasks that encourage users to dance and interact within the scene (like Jump, Hand Ups, Make Some Noise, and Move It).

During the ‘group hug’ challenge, the crowd huddles together into a giant mess of avatars, awkwardly holding hug poses until the progress bar fills up. Challenges like this bring crowds together and help channel a sense of unity.

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