Gimme a Beat: Survios Invites You to Live Out Your DJ Fantasies with ‘Electronauts,’ Available Now on Rift

Last week, Survios lifted the curtain on the launch lineup for their highly anticipated DJing app, Electronauts. Whether you’ve mastered the art of the mix or you’re a turntable novice, the developer’s innovative Music Reality Engine ensures you’ll never miss a beat, so you can bring down the house with a roomful of friends or meet up in VR for a collaborative set. And today, we’re excited to share that the experience Android Central called “the VR music maker you didn’t know you wanted” is now available on Rift!

With eight digital instruments at your virtual fingertips, you can loop, layer, and mashup killer cuts with confidence—no lessons required. Add in 40+ songs from some of the hottest artists in electronica, hip-hop, and beyond, and you’ve got a recipe for hours of entertainment only possible in VR.

We caught up with Survios Co-Founder & President and Electronauts Project Lead & Creative Director Nathan Burba for the low-down on the latest title from one of VR’s most innovative studios—and its somewhat surprising departure from the team’s core gaming roots.

Nathan Burba: Back when I was studying Interactive Media at USC, I caught wind of a small mobile web app called Plink. The app lets you play a few simple quantized musical interfaces with strangers online. Anyone who tried it instantly could have a few minutes of fun with it. I had also been obsessed with Arpeggiators, which are a simple way to automate notes being played in real-time. Jon Ratcliff, our lead engineer, is also inspired by Electroplankton and other musical video games.

In 2016, we had the opportunity to start prototyping a new project in VR, so the first thing we started working on was getting some of these musical concepts up and running in VR. From there, as more people came onto the project, we started adding new and different interfaces. Rasik [Srinath Ramesh] got basic quantization working and wrote a synthesizer into the game. Henry [Halvorson] came in and defined the backing track and stem systems. We just kept adding musical interfaces that were fun to play around with in real-time. To help us prototype, we found stems online of songs we recognized. One early prototype had a remix of Beastie Boys and Nine Inch Nails tracks.

From a creative standpoint, in early 2016 I started getting into the music scene by going to music festivals. Events like Terrakroma and Burning Man inspired the psychedelic visuals, while cinematic sci-fi staples like Tron inspired a lot of visual design. We also feel like there’s an ’80s revival going on with films like Thor: Ragnarok, and Electronauts definitely has a bit of an ’80s feel to it.

NB: We often hear things like, “I just want to stay in this world.” For anyone who is into music, especially electronic music, this experience just feels like home.

We’ve also gotten very enthusiastic feedback from music producers and the recording industry. Watching an artist like 12th Planet, Dada Life, TOKiMONSTA, or Krewella play their own music in VR alongside a music fan is really something special.

NB: I’ve been involved in many VR projects, dating back to the Project Holodeck days of Wild Skies and Zombies on the Holodeck to Survios’s released games Raw Data and Sprint Vector. In each VR project, interface design and feedback are huge challenges. Electronauts was a unique challenge because it’s incredibly interface heavy, and the interface needs to be simple and intuitive. In addition, the usually reliable feedback mechanism of audio is not there. We don’t play any sound effects because it would interrupt the music.

So there was a ton of experimentation. We opted for the “hover inside and click” paradigm over the “touch” paradigm because it’s much easier for you to be precise and build muscle memory this way. Electronauts needs to feel like a finely-tuned instrument, so players can be confident that practicing will help them reach a certain level of mastery.

Electronauts borrows a lot of design concepts. A few included are the third-person camera system, which is similar to Zombies on the Holodeck. The “standing on a ship flying through the world” concept is borrowed from Wild Skies. Then we added many new concepts, like drumsticks to increase your reach and touch interfaces like the orbs and synth ball.

NB: We produced a lot of music internally to build out the fundamentals of Electronauts. In total, we had eight in-house music producers, most of them doubling as audio engineers, on the project at various stages. Early on, Henry, Rasik, Spencer [Kitagawa], Ed [Tucker], and Cameron [MacNair] produced original tracks that helped us shape and iterate on the interface—it would have been impossible to create that without music.

After we finalized the interface, Zach [Gonzalez], Hunter [Kitagawa], and Roger [Jao] worked incredibly hard to bring external musicians into the game. We’re working with everyone from incredibly popular Grammy-winning artists to little-known underground ones and everything in between. The game lets players have full control of popular songs. The only way we could do that was to build a high level of trust with artists, publishers, producers, and labels in the music industry.

NB: The MRE is a really unique piece of technology. It’s a sampling and synthesis engine that lets you take apart a song and completely remix it in real-time.

It started as a prototype being built by Rasik in Pure Data (aka Pd), which gives us very low level control of the audio coming out of a computer. We then started building new modules on top of it. When Cameron came onto the project, he integrated Faust, a functional programming language for digital signal processing (DSP), which had only been really used in colleges and universities at the time, to optimize much of the Pure Data logic that we had written.

One of the biggest challenges we faced when developing the engine was balancing flexibility with standardization. Ultimately, we had to choose how many instruments were available, how many samples per instruments we could play, how many tracks and stems we would be limited to, how many vocals we could include, etc.—not to mention limiting the music to a fairly simple 4:4 time signature.

The game itself is built in Unity, but it interfaces with the Music Reality Engine using LibPD, allowing us to keep the engine completely abstracted from the game engine, which makes it easy to use in future projects.

NB: Many people spend hours, days, weeks, even years learning how to play an instrument like the guitar or piano. What makes Electronauts stand out from other music creation apps is how easy it is to use for everyone who tries it, even if you’ve never tried playing music before. After watching so many non-musicians play Electronauts, it's incredibly inspiring to myself and the rest of the team that we can give people the sensation of jamming in a matter of seconds.

Electronauts is also unique because it’s designed to be shared with friends who aren’t in VR. The music you create should be heard by the world, whether you stream it online or use it to DJ a party with your friends. Electronauts is not just an experience—it’s a tool to make our lives better.

NB: Personally, now that I’ve learned so much about electronic music, I want to get more into music production by learning how to use Ableton and Splice along with a new synthesizer I purchased.

As far as Survios goes, we’re following up Electronauts with our first collaboration with MGM: CREED: Rise to Glory™, an intense cinematic boxing game set within the Creed™ and Rocky™ film franchises. Beyond that, we have a number of titles currently in the works, so stay tuned.

NB: Your support for this project means an incredible amount to us. We’ve been working for over two years to make the impossible happen, and we hope this work inspires a new generation of music creators in the 21st century.

Thanks for sounding off, Nathan. We can’t wait for the Rift community to get hands-on with all that Electronauts has to offer.

Join the Survios Discord channel to share your thoughts, or follow them on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. You can crush your next set solo or enjoy a cross-platform jam session with Electronauts on Rift today!

— The Oculus Team