AliveInVR Brings Virtual Reality To Ableton Live

AliveInVR is a new virtual reality MIDI controller for Ableton Live, based on the HTC Vive platform.

AliveInVR allows you to trigger clips, play instruments and mix with a giant 3D MIDI controller interface in VR.

Here’s a video guide to how it works:

AliveInVR is available now in the Steam Store.

If you’ve used AliveInVR, leave a comment and share your thoughts on it!

via Jim Simons

21 thoughts on “AliveInVR Brings Virtual Reality To Ableton Live”

  1. Excellent work, and I hope the comments here will reflect the effort put in, rather than having a dig. What impresses me the most is the accuracy of the controllers! It must look pretty cool to the person wearing the headset, having that stuff appear around you.

  2. The detachable drum pads are cool. Note-mode seems problematic as you can not play chords with only two hands vs. ten fingers on something like Push. I don’t feel the look, but that’s a question of personal taste. It will take some time for developers to understand this interface and come up with new forms of interaction. By now they mostly seem to port mouse-and-key-interaction to 3d-space. It was the same with iOS-apps in the beginning before they really discovered the potential of multi-touch. So overall, this is good news everyone.

    1. Agree. I’m a Vive owner and interested in seeing where it goes with music creation.

      There’s a trippy VR world where people can meet up and create virtual visuals and music but it’s more DJ than composer. I forget the name.

      Was a VR studio with cartoon glowing graphics as well. I bought it on steam last year but the developer has now abandoned it to work for google.

  3. what ever ,blatent rip of behringers forward thinking .
    vr is over rated anyway ,augmented reality is way cooler plus you don’t look stupid wearing a headset and can still see everything about you.

    1. Well done flappy. Generic anti-vr rhetoric. Total nonsense of course as AR is butt ugly as well. VR has its place alongside AR. They are parallel technologies rather than competing.

      I’ve been using VR since 2006. Nothing overrated about it.

    2. Is that Behringer (DeadRinger) your talking about? 🙂 This’ll come out in AR when the AR platforms are affordable. AR’ll be great as you can mix your real instruments and controllers with the virtual stuff.

  4. Pretty cool! Looks like it’d be fun to play around with. Great job! Already mentioned but being able to grab the drum pads and place them around is a excellent idea. Being able to stream the performance is cool too. Exciting stuff, I can see this going many places! May have to start looking around for a decent price on a Vive.

    Just a few random ideas as I watched the demo. Take full advantage of what VR offers: For those drum pads, it might be nice to be able color code them, be able to resize the boxes, and label them to tell them apart. So you could create a virtual kit that kind of resembles what they’re mapped to. User selectable button styles for the different screens. Be able to put scene or clip buttons all around you (like the drum pads) and have everything hang around no matter what screen you’re on. Might need a button to turn on lines to show you where the floating buttons are originally mapped to. Instead of screens for track volume and pan make a button to activate “mixing mode” where a small box appears with the tracks as spheres that you manipulate in 3D space (left/right for pan, backwards/forwards for volume). For an example of what that might look like check out “The Art Of Mixing” by David Gibson on YouTube. For more precise tuning, offer the ability to select a sphere and use sliders on the left and bottom of the cube for control. Be able to save and load a snapshot of your “studio” outside of the project you’re working on might be handy too.

    Just ideas. Don’t get me wrong, this is a good start! Very inspiring project.

    1. Thanks for the comments Mike. A lot of good ideas in there, the App will evolve over time, the strategy is keep it simple to start with and develop it based on user feedback.

  5. if you have a vive it could be fun, it isn’t that expensive so if I had one I would totally try it out, I just question why – like it seems like it would be something fun to have at home but it straddles that – does someone really want to watch you live either standing there a a vr headset on or a screen of your display – none would be particularly fun to watch live.

    1. Depends how it’s presented. If the audience could see what the vr performer was doing via a big screen… creating music via digitally induced hallucination can be art as well.

      1. see that is the thing – if you could set it to do some sort of video interpretation based on what you are doing or something it might be interesting but someone standing with a headset on moving around virtual boxes seems like it would be way more interesting to the person performing than the person watching

  6. Ugh. As much as I hate glass rubbing and how ridiculously unresponsive it is. I can only imagine how clunky this will be until they get the kinks worked out.

  7. Enough with the midi controllers and Ableton.
    Go Eurorack and give a real performance. I walk out of a club when I see you laptop performers checking your emails and looking foolish

  10. It would be good to see it use Leap Motion hand controllers and possibly down the line to bring it to a wider audience – say if people could use their bog standard phones and Trinus VR ( and it would all be wireless)

    1. Hey Mike,

      Re the Leap: I’ve tested it in the App and it doesn’t feel that good as a user experience as the hands disappear if not directly in front of you – due to Leap’s field of view from the headset.

      That and the lack of force feedback has led me to not support it. This may change with a later Leap SDK if it works better though.

      Cheers,
      Jim

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