The MetaObject
29
Developers
7
Time Zones
100
Percent of Development Done Remotely
9,000,000
Songs Processed
36,900,000,000
Lines of Metadata Made Real
ViRvii was an exploratory project funded by Facebook/Oculus to build out a new way for data and users to interact, a culmination of 3 years of theory and prototyping.
Here is what I made.
The world of technology and social media has been reaching many tipping points; alt-right trends in YouTube’s algorithm, Instagram beauty standards, and news-virality on Facebook have all made clear some inherent flaws in how our technological structure operates. More are being found all the time, and ViRvii was created in response to a problem we all definitely share.
Content Curation and Recommendations
We all can’t find things to enjoy. And there are a few major reasons for that.
Content is overwhelming. 500 Hours of Content hit Youtube every minute. Four years of shows and films are on Netflix. 40,000 songs hit Spotify every single day. And this is only accelerating.
Content is overwhelming. 500 Hours of Content hit Youtube every minute. Four years of shows and films are on Netflix. 40,000 songs hit Spotify every single day. And this is only accelerating.
Content is overwhelming. 500 Hours of Content hit Youtube every minute. Four years of shows and films are on Netflix. 40,000 songs hit Spotify every single day. And this is only accelerating.
So I began playing with an idea. The world of programmatic content has been around a long time but modern tools finally brought it home, so I cracked open blender and started playing with two things – polygons and textures. The method is nothing exciting – I created a texture, and I used that to create the ‘shape’ effect a polygon would experience. I kept some screenshots that I was posting online as I learned how to do it that help explain it.
On the right you can see the texture – a really cool rainbow type, and the simple wave in it produces a pretty cool shape when combined with a few other layers.
Now see what happens when I change the texture – the shape shifts. And for months I played with these elements, because textures I can generate cheaply and simply with little CPU, and I can build a little texture maker that takes information and makes it into an image easily.
Some super fun experiments gave me very cool shapes. Similar textures would produce shapes that felt the same, even though they were different. It was strange. Eerie actually. Suddenly something clicked. What if I took the metadata from content, turned the groups of it into textures, and applied that to a series of polygons?
And the first ViRvii MetaObject was born.
The same process essentially, thanks to the Unreal Engine we are able to combine hundreds of layers, particles, polygons and more instantly from thousands of lines of data. And it looks really cool to boot!
Then we took this process and applied it to more purpose-built things like these trees. Rotation, style, color and more could be changed with this meta data.
And then if you use the metaobject itself as a seed for other metaobjects – like this landscape – the colors, styles, and more shift and become unique on a per-song basis. Suddenly you have something necessary for success.
Scalable content for literally every song in the world.
An interactive playful space that reacts to the user
Exploration that isn’t prescriptive and directed
Tools to make new content that is crafted – yet reactive to anything
An engine to enable true discovery.
That last one is where it gets exciting.
The essence of discovery and exploration has been wholly forgotten in the data driven era. Where once we wandered and found things by surprise, it now is fed to us by engineers who built programs that try to decide what we should like. But it doesn’t work. Nobody sees recommendations on any platform and thinks ‘oh my god, what a gem!’.
ViRvii returns this process to its natural state by letting people play with data in a tactile, diagetic way, enabling this play to show them what they might like. Let me show you how it works.
Lets start with this ViRvii. Assume it’s for your favorite song. I’m going to guess WAP by Cardi and Meagan.
Here are two other songs you like. Maybe it’s some Metallica on the left, and the right one is Sade’s Harvest Moon. You have a super unique flavor. Most of us do.
Take a look at your three ViRvii. Now, if i show you more, do any stand out and something you might also like?
You’ll be able to match a bit. The system works by letting the insane pattern matching capabilities of your perception find connections, instead of relying on a machine that simply can’t do the same thing. The result is an exploratory but delightful system that allows anyone to find something new.
And have Fun While They Do
All content is owned by respective license holders. My own work is my own, what I did for them is theirs.