Post by babypigeon in VRtuos comments

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Hi,

just recently downloaded the app for the Quest 2. the hand tracking isn't so great on Quest 2, so I can understand there being some glitches. the Keyboard calibration was very off though, not sure if that's because im using an electronic keyboard vs. a grand piano...

one VERY important note: the option to playback MIDI songs and see the notes being played is very cool, but I personally really wanted to be able to bring in my own PDF sheet music so I could play while reading the music in VR. I almost assumed this would be a feature, given this is how people actually learn how to play piano. Practically speaking, it takes much much longer to learn songs playing from MIDI as opposed to reading the sheet music. Converting MIDI's into playable notes does nothing more than turn these beautiful piano pieces into complicated beat saber songs. Fun to play, easy on the ears, but not much depth, emotion, or actual learning is produced.

This is a long passionate way of saying, I love the idea, and it would be that much better if we could just bring our own PDF Sheets into VR and read them while playing!

Pavel Marceluch3 years ago

Hi, thanks for your feedback. If you cant get the calibration right, you can always offset it in the settings.

Sheet music is something I thought about many times but still didn't figure out the way to implement it. Having just a PDF reader doesn't make sense, because it doesn't add any value to the VR aspect of it, you will have a better experience if you just print it out. Reading the PDF itself and trying to generate midi is practically impossible.

Generating sheet music from the midi files is probably possible, but it will never be even close to handmade sheets. Would it be even readable in VR and notes flying by?

This is a complex issue that I'm figuring out since the beginning. I would like to implement it at some point but I'm still not sure if VRtuos is even the right place for it. I love how you said that converting MIDI's into playable notes turns songs into beat saber maps. After all, if you can read sheet music, you probably don't need this app.

I'd love to hear more from you about this. If you want, you can contact me at contact@vrtuos.eu, or join our Discord server.

Thank you.

babypigeon3 years ago

One of the great value props of your app for me, a pianist who can read sheet music, is simply being able to do so in a VR space, in any environment of my choosing. I recently began streaming myself playing piano on TikTok, and could imagine VR taking my piano content creation videos to the next level. For example, I'd like to bring my own avatar into VRtuos, and customize my scene in the app, then set up a VR camera and record myself in the VR space so that it's my 3D avatar playing the VRtuos piano in a beautiful VR scene (like they do with the beat saber mixed reality capture using LIV).

I've been playing piano for many years, but was never classically trained and can't play by ear, so reading sheet music is the only way I can learn new songs. Like I mentioned, it would just take weeks for me to try and memorize the beat saber map-esque set of MIDI notes whereas I can pick up almost any song via sheet music in 5-10 hours, and could speed this up with practice. If your goal is to educate people to play piano, I truly believe teaching them to read sheet music is the solution.

There are definitely creative ways to incorporate VR to enhance the sheet music "sight-reading" experience. One idea off the top of my head is while the piano is playing back the song, lighting up the notes as they're being played, not necessarily having the notes drop down from the sky (which makes sense and is natural for MIDI clips). but even just simply being able to produce pdf sheets that behave like paper and sit in front of me while i am inside VRtuos, would be more than enough for someone like me, because this is how i've done it in the real world for so many years. It just feels natural and I assume it'll be there, and then when I don't have the sheet music and can't bring it in, almost feels like I'm being restricted, or one of my real world freedoms has been taken away in VR (not to sound too dramatic, but i believe its important philosophy for any VR experience).

I'm writing this freehand so its a little disorganized. Love talking about VR, am learning how to develop VR experiences myself. Will definitely join your discord!

itch.io

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