Vaughan Merrick : Maison_Merrick
Spatial Design Media for the 21st Century
I am extremely excited about narrative design and storytelling in virtual environments. The Meta Quest and Apple Vision Pro head-mounted displays are basically at the “Model T” car era of virtual reality and spatial computing. For some time, I have been working in Unreal Engine (UE), the video game engine used to create games, architectural visualizations, advertising, and film and television production (the sets for The Mandalorian are created in UE for example). UE allows for environment design, spatial audio design, animation, “non-player character” orchestration AI, physics simulation and particle system simulations. UE t0gether with AI creation tools allow for a new, expansive, creative canvas of possibilities in immersive worlds.
Above is a spatial audio design prototype that I’ve been working on. Imagine musical instruments of your favorite song or composition placed in an environment that you as a “player” can move through. In this space, the audio can also drive visual actors.
Maison_Merrick is an endeavor to bring artists together to entertain their creative boundaries in immersive environments. How does audio and visual composition change as a “player” moves through the space? What are the narratives told by the environment? What are the stories told by the “non-player” characters in a space? Consider the effect of a change in physics reacting to a dynamic musical tempo or the color of the sky reacting to an orchestral swell?
The Album of the 21st Century will be more than just streaming audio. It will be a place to expand narratives into a more complete identity; a place where stories from the music will further elucidate the feeling and the habitation of the music. Album artwork will no longer just be images on a screen or cardboard; it will be a place the audience is immersed in and a part of.
The Model Little Dreams VR prototype
The concept for The Model Little Dreams VR experiment was for the viewer to dream of the big city and then teleport to a socialite club with a spatialized soundtrack and mini narratives of power, corruption and lies acted out by non-player characters.
Metahuman, “Bastet”, is one of many characters who would populate the Little Dreams club in this video. More Metahuman characters presented below.This cast of characters for The Model Little Dreams VR originated in Midjourney AI, was converted to mesh form in Blender and manifested in Unreal Engine’s Metahuman.
Spatial audio for the virtual world
Spatial audio in the immersive world requires bespoke purpose built systems. Unlike other audio-only spatial audio (i.e. Dolby ATMOS), audio for immersion in the virtual world must take into account how the audience might interact with the audio.
