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I have been experimenting with augmented reality music on iOS and I think my game Broken Place would be perfect on mobile! I’m working on building a miniature version of my vision of Broken Place that will focus purely on the music and performance aspects. I think there will be tons of learnings in this pursuit!

I’ll be opening beta very soon on iOS for a port of Broken Place in it’s most basic form. I plan to continue to maintain the app for the next two years where I will be adding more songs and content. I’ve spent the last month building what I think is a fun way to interact with music in AR and I think I’m ready to give you all a few songs to play with. Below is an early video I shot last week in the park.

Keeping Accessibility top of mind

I’ve been diligent in researching accessibility standards in spacial computing. While my early prototypes may seem to lack accessibility options, I have been documenting the things I plan to incorporate before launch as well as already implementing some of the more immediately actionable items that are within my current technical abilities.

AR in itself is pretty inaccessible partly due to hardware limitations. My goal is, at the very least, to have the music playable with only one hand. I think once we have HMD’s integrated in our everyday lives, this will help many of the accessibility concerns I have but, until then, I’ll cover what I can.

Pending settings that I am building out currently are high contrast, text size, and height adjustment settings. If you have any other suggestions, please submit them through this contact form.

Content Submission

I’m also still thinking through the content editor side of things. I’m hoping to build a way for users to submit their own patches as a later update. Unfortunately, this requires a bit of Pure Data knowledge on the player’s end. Content submission will likely run on a WordPress app with access handled on a case by case basis. Users would be able to upload their vanilla Pure Data patch in a new WordPress post and load the post from their iOS device running Broken Place. I will initially make the song data public only with very clear indicators of this being the case. I want to be respectful of original content but in full transparency, it’s a technical limitation currently to have patches run remotely without latency. An option will be added that allows players to log in to their own private songs. Subscribing for updates is a good way to get access first!

Will it be free?

🙁 I can’t. Moving to the iOS platform was a task that required unexpected expenses. I’d like to be as transparent as I can about this project. Publishing an app on the App Store is difficult for a hobbiest like myself. For this game, I had to buy a Mac computer to even allow me to test things via xcode. I bought a modestly configured Mac Mini for $600 and was in business. I also have to pay my Apple Developer License ($99) to get it published, not to mention the need for a legitimate Pro Unity license (an expense of a few hundred dollars.) Simply put, I need to recoup some of this cost and that’s partially why I’m racing to a release. I’ve seen many simple AR apps going for around $1.99 and will likely follow suit. Apple will already take 30% off of that so I hope you understand why it is a paid app. 🙂

What other cool features are you exploring?

Here’s a list from my whiteboard:

• BoseAR integration
• Bluetooth/Wireless MIDI connectivity
• “Bop-It” mode where you are against the clock to perform actions in the patch
• Gaze Input for interacting with music UI elements
• Epic visuals
• wireless display mirroring so folks can see what you’re doing in AR easier
• More visual indication of where a sequencer is on the UI
• A dog to pet

I made a fun dialogue system for my game recently. I thought it would be great to have a gibberish system to translate text dialogue to the user’s preferred language while still feeling conversational. I think I can work out translation side pretty easily, but what I found to be a blocker was making convincingly conversational gibberish sounds. The solution was obvious; Pure Data excels at this task. Below is a rough sketch of a patch I made to generate the ‘words.’

I took an oscillator and created an 8 step sequencer of slopes. These slopes will randomly animate the pitch of the oscillator from one value to the other. The slope step is chosen at random by a random number generator that is triggered by each word of the dialogue. The oscillator goes out to another oscillator to give us that robotic FM synthesis sound. I think it’s a solid foundation that I can build on going forward. Maybe sample rate reduction on the voice or some type or robotic effect.

Here’s a video of it in action:

A bit about the Unity side of things

Let’s talk a bit about the Unity side of this! You’ll see in the Unity editor screenshot there is an editor script for the dialogue triggers and the manager for all the objects to assign information to and manage Pure Data messages to send at the start and end of the conversation. In the case of the video above, it sends a message of thronStart to the patch. When dialogue has reached the last line, it sends throneEnd which I have routed to start the metronome and song. This editor script is great because I can make different versions of the voice patch and change the character name associated to give voices some variation. This is stored in the Pure Data Character Name field (in screenshot, defined as orbVoice.)

Next I hope to make the system more aware of pauses in speech. Currently it’s just triggering at a uniform space of time between words. I’d like for it to later recognize commas or periods and translate those to pauses and more dynamic delivery of the phrase. Maybe even have properties for each line of dialogue to define the emotion of the delivery (angry, sad, scared, etc.) Onward!