Lava Lamp
A relaxing visualizer that generates “bubbles” within a lava lamp that respond to live mic input based on the spectrum audio data.
Instructions
There are 2 builds — one that responds to my Chuck narrative and one responds to live mic input. The narrative build allows you to replay the narrative by pressing the “n” key.
Each has arrow control keys for camera positioning and the mouse controls the camera viewing angle. Built for MacOS.
I wanted to create a peaceful visual to listen to music next to. I started with the idea of having spheres correlate to various parts of the sound spectrum, and after some experimenting with animating spheres in Unity, realized I could create a fun “lava lamp” visual. The most difficult part was tweaking the parameters for the spheres to make their motion make as much sense and visually pleasing as possible. I assigned the average frequency magnitude to the radius and speed of the sphere, each with a different scaling factor. Different colors represent different frequency registers as well. The waveform acts as a dynamic base to the lava lamp that reminds me of electricity and novel plasma lamps.
I created all the models in the scene using Unity and Blender, and downloaded the galaxy skybox from the Unity Asset Store. I also used iTween to control the animation of the bubbles. The bass lines in my narratives are pulled from Looperman: first and second.
My narrative below is a fun experiment that pulls from my DJing experience, so I wanted to try and generate fun Chuck audio and do a mini “transition.” Hopefully you can recognize the melodies and the music makes you laugh a bit (the instruments were pretty fun to play around with).
Live Input Unity Package:
Narrative Unity Package: