WebVR Experiments: Musical Forest

Musical Forest is a WebVR Experiment by Google Creative Lab using “co-presence” - the synchronization of multiple people in a virtual space - to allow people to play music together in VR. All the players’ experiences are sync’d in real-time using WebSocket connections.

A couple of years after I stopped working there full-time, Google Creative Lab in NY decided to get the band back together and asked me to create custom co-presence server software, enabling the participants to see each other’s movements and share the musical experience in VR. I worked with the team at Google to make the smoothest connections possible and to ensure that the system would support tens of thousands of simultaneous users around the world.

I designed and built the entire server system, writing the websocket server in node.js (on request! 😬) along with custom load testing software in Erlang. The system used Cloud Pub/Sub and Cloud Datastore for client and horizontal server scaling synchronization, and I deployed it to Google’s global cloud platform using Docker and Kubernetes on Google Container Engine, testing performance up to 7,500 concurrent users per region across USA, Europe and Asia.

Press/media coverage in The FWA, Thirst4Beats, Android Headlines.