Hyperscreen

Official Website

HYPERSCREEN is an art and music platform I co-founded in 2020. Starting this project amidst the pandemic, we organized multiple events and performances that explore innovation and community building in virtual experiences.

With China going on lockdown mode after the pandemic started, many foreigners left, and the international communities were severely impacted. At the same time, music and art venues, serving as gathering places for communities, found it difficult to survive.

I’ve been passionate about building tools for artistic expression and communal experiences for a long time. This seemed like a good opportunity to explore my curiosity for a good cause. Teaming up with independent label Metasonar, HYPERSCREEN was born…

HYPERSCREEN Vol.3: Diaspora

Our last event, Diaspora, happened simultaneously in virtual and physical space. We built a world in VRChat specifically for the event, and streamed the Shanghai artists’ performance from ALL Club into the virtual venue.

Also placed within the virtual venue was Parc Instrumental, a series of sound sculptures created by composer Jialin Liu. They are instruments that invite the listener to enter their structure. The instruments and their sound were designed and simulated in Modalys.

I worked closely with Jialin to install the instruments into the VRchat world by creating their visual representations, and replicating their aural environment in Unity3D.

Check out our tour guide for Parc Instrumental here.

WebGL Virtual World

Before moving the virtual venue to VRChat, we built our own virtual worlds accessible in-browser. It comes with the usual bells and whistles of an MMORPG sandbox game, plus streaming from offline venue / musician’s bedrooms, and a hacky but powerful live-coding system that controls the visuals on the skydome.

See also

HYPERSCREEN

• Vol.3: Diaspora Official Recap, VRChat world
• Vol.2: TITAN Official Recap, Recast Video
• Vol.1: MOON recap video, full performance (3h), full livecoding

VRChat rave scene

• I Went Clubbing in Virtual Reality: Raves of VRChat, PBS Voices, 2022
• The Virtual Underground: An Introduction to VRChat’s Rave Scene, Straszfilms, 2021