The First Ever VR Piano Lesson
If you’ve not been keeping up with my recent releases, I’ll bring you up to speed - I’ve improved the performance and load times of Grand Reality, as well as adding a new multiplayer mode which allows you to play the piano in virtual reality with other people playing on the same piano. You can now chat and play piano in VR to your heart’s desire!
There’s a distinct lack of piano teachers in VR
I was hoping to set up a lesson with a real-life piano teacher in VR. Firstly because I think it will be useful for testing the app but also because I’m stuck indoors all day and I’d like to use some of that time to improve my piano-playing.
It’s proved very hard to find a piano teacher who also owns an Oculus Quest! I started out trying to contact people on Quest community forums, but with no luck I started emailing loads of Gumtree piano teachers asking if any of them had a Quest — none of them did! I guess most Quest owners, at the moment at least, are gamers, not pianists.
I bought a second headset
As a quick aside, I didn’t mention this before, but back in March (before Quest prices went through the roof), I managed to get a cheap second-hand Quest on ebay. It didn’t have any controllers but that wasn’t a problem because I’m only going to be using it for piano hand-tracking. Actually, as an aside to the aside, I now use hand-tracking so much that I’m quite annoyed when I have to dig out my controllers for something. Hopefully in the future, Oculus will make all of the menus and interactions hands-only, so that they can make the controllers an optional addition. This would massively reduce the cost of the Quest headset for those of us who mainly use hand-tracking apps.
Anyway, back to my original goal — setting up a lesson in VR. Having completely failed to find a Quest-wielding piano teacher, I fell back on plan B, which was to use my government-allotted daily walk to walk to my brother’s house and leave my spare Quest headset at his door. He kindly agreed to let me attempt to teach him to play a piece in virtual reality using Grand Reality.
You can see the video of our lesson below;
I’m hoping that this video might inspire some Quest-owning piano teachers to come out of the woodwork and offer to take me on as their first virtual student. I’m willing to pay, so send me a message if that sounds like you.
Conclusions
Like I say in the video, there are still a few teething problems but I’m finding ways to improve the user experience all of the time. Also, in many ways, a VR lesson is actually better than a traditional lesson. Aside from the obvious social-distancing benefit, the teacher can overlay their hand on the students— something that physics won’t let you do in real life. You’re also sat in exactly the same position relative to the piano, so there’s no leaning over, no contorting your body to hit those bass notes.
Do you know any piano teachers who have access to an Oculus Quest? It would really help me out if you can get in touch. Thanks!
You can download Grand Reality for free on SideQuest. Head over to https://GrandReality.app for more details.
