Modular reality: Analogues of patching in immersive space

Abstract

Despite decades of virtual reality (VR) research, current creative workflows remain far from VR founder Jaron Lanier’s musically inspired dream of collaboratively ‘improvising reality’ from within. Drawing inspiration from modular synthesis as a distinctive musically immersed culture and practice, this article presents a new environment for visual programming within VR that supports live, fine-grained, multi-artist collaboration, through a new framework for operational transformations on graph structures. Although presently focused on audio synthesis, it is articulated as a first step along a path to synthesising worlds.