Franc-Tamponnage 2018 goes AR & VR!



Magna Vox is an association located at Dijon organizing concerts in the Burgundy – Franche – Comté region. In 2017 we already participate to the Franc Tamponnage‘s edition, with some applications you can find here. This time we improved one and create two others!

VR Game:

Magna Vox asked Da Viking Code for a quick, fun and innovative digital experience to entertain their metal-loving participants. One of our proposals was a scoring orientated zombie VR shooter in a medieval environment.

In this VR game the player possesses two objects, a handgun with 20 bullets in each magazine to kill hordes of zombies and golems, and a flashlight as the game is played during nigh-time.
The Game starts with the player alone in a small lobby area comprised of a medieval town, in front of him a gigantic screen in which the promotional video of the event is looping.
When ready the player shoots a small rotating cube, he is then teleported into the starting zone of the game.

The game is comprised of 5 zones in the map, in each of these zones the player will face 2 hordes of foes coming at him from various spawn zones around his position, some foes have a predefined type, time and spawn area, others are more or totally random; allowing both for controlled level design and bits of surprises.

The player appears in a game area and will face these 2 hordes until his death or the death of every enemy, if he died he is teleported to a special location where his score will be given to him and then he will come back to the lobby area.

Should he survive though all waves of enemies for this area, he will be teleported to the next one and continue to be transported until he finishes them all or die trying.
In each zone the player can walk around for a few meters using the room-scaling option of the HTC Vive.

The gun animation was very carefully designed because in VR you can observe very closely and under any angle the objects you are holding.

Building a VR game for Magna Vox was a fun experience and deepened our knowledge and understanding of the various uses of virtual reality. The game is available here for HTC Vive and Oculus Touch.

The Companion/Event App:

In parallel of this development, we decided to throw as a bonus a mobile app, as we had some fun ideas and Magna Vox gave us carte blanche. So we built a fun mobile app to help people keep track of events on their phone and have a fast link from events to the event pages on facebook – and they could see them all in one place.

This was also a great exercise in fully designing a tiny app ourselves! It’s available on both the apple app store (here) and google play store (here).

Tamsen also thought it would be a great opportunity to create a pocket sample/drum machine for every music lover and musicians attending the events – one that he would appreciate using himself.
Aymeric pushed in a little AR experience which would play over posters of the event the corresponding teaser video.

So there was the “events” section, “AR” section, and the little synth + sample + drum machine.Here’s the main screen which would lead to the different sections:

You can still experience the calendar of events :

All passed events would turn white on grey (the ones in this picture were not done yet) and the screen would automatically jump to the page of events that were closest in time to when you accessed the screen.

The little synth / drum machine thingy named “Baroufle” (the meaning of this name is akin to “a loud cacophony”) was a load of fun to build and we’d love to create a standalone version some day, maybe with extra sound packs, you really need to download this app just for this and give us feedback – or request a “full” version 😛

For now this is basically a software sequencer for one 16 step pattern (one per instrument) and two instruments (samples/drums and synth).

We tried to make it as simple as possible to use, but also playful. That’s why you’ll see the buttons used to input notes have strange and unconventional icons , pushing you to explore. The samples are made by Tamsen and are a mix of drum hits and weird noises. The synth instrument is a hard bass/melody type.

The inspiration comes from apps such as iELECTRIBE , though we come nowhere close to the amount of options and sound quality and so on, the idea was to have a drummachine like feel, but be able to add melodies on top – and to make all of that fit on Tamsen’s iphone SE.

Coding wise, The sample player/Sequencers and Synth come from the great unity plugin Audio Helm which can be found here , we didn’t have time to work out a cross platform solution to access whatever native SDK are available these days on ios and/or android, audiohelm saved the day and sounds awesome.

Helm is also a VST synth and its presets can be used in the unity plugin. that helped create the sound of Baroufle.

The sound can be manipulated in realtime by touching the “screen” area of the machine (the part with strange strokes of colors). This part is a “screen” with a generative and audio reactive display which Tamsen designed for the festival, initially to be projected but we couldn’t get to it.
It basically acts as a touch X/Y Controller for the synth and sample’s available effects and filters. You can get the sound real loud and dirty by dragging your fingers on it.

Scenography :

Our contribution to the Scenography this year is an improved version of the year before (you can read about it here). This time we managed to make milumin (the software used by the person in charge of projecting video from backstage to the back of the scene) communicate with processing through Syphon
which is a plugin that rasterizes and send video frames through a server, thankfully we made that run on local machines, and the processing sketch reacted to audio from the sound setup on stage so we really got to see the sketch react to the sounds of the bands !

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.