Max Glenister

For today’s hack I’ve decided to make a VR beat sequencer. Nothing says inclusive-fun like a VR experience that makes noise! So let’s get on with that.

I actually made a 2d Beatmaker a month ago. You can play with it here and view the source here. So for today’s hack I’m pretty much taking that an adding an extra dimension.

I created the board by looping over a list of the sounds to create rows in the sequencer, and then created a cell in each row for each “tick”. My sequencer has 16 ticks per sound.

To mark the cells as “active” I started with an ongazelong event from vreticle, but this had some interaction issues on mobile due to the left/right eye reticles not converging correctly, and the cells being too small to hit comfortably.

I threw that out and decided to switch to a combination of raycasting and using addEventListener to listen for click events. This works really nicely, and with Google Cardboard v2 and it’s capacative switch it’s really easy to use.

For the sound samples I’m using a casette-processed set of TR-909 sequencer sound effects from Bedroom Producers Blog. There’s a huge selection, but I’ve only included 11 of them to keep the vertical size of the sequencer usable.