The Campanile is probably UC Berkeley's most iconic system. Atop it sits the carillon, a massive musical instrument consisting of 61 bells. All around Berkeley you can hear it ring the hour and broadcast music, but few get to go near it, let alone play it. Virtual Campanile - developed as a project team under VR@Berkeley, gives people a change to experience playing the instrument for themselves.
In the same way the Internet democratized information, I think VR will enable the democratization of experience. Things that are costly to do or see in real life - either financially, geographically or otherwise - can be virtually experienced for free and by anyone.
This project aimed to take a famous but inaccessible local experience, and open-source it for all to try. Over the last two years, the Virtual Campanile has been tried by thousands in the Berkeley community, from tourists to professional musicians, many of whom were trying VR for the first time.
In building Virtual Campanile, we tried to stay as close to the real thing as possible. The HTC Vive was the perfect platform for this project. The 360 degrees room-scale motion tracking lets you move around the room freely and hit the keys precisely. The carillon room and the instrument were modelling in Maya using blueprints from the real istrument. The background of the Berkeley skyline is a skybox created by stitching together photographs of the actual view from the top of the tower. The sound samples, given to us from the Berkeley Carillon Guild, allowed us to recreate the full set of bells in high fidelity. We added a spring under each key to realistic model the physics of a key press, and used NewtonVR for controller interaction.
Here's a user trying out the demo. See if you can spot the Golden Gate Bridge!