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Animated crowds dance to the tempo of the currently playing song.
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Explore the festival using a Microsoft Kinect.
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An eBay widget tells you about popular merch related to the current artist.
Music festivals during a coronavirus outbreak?
As the COVID-19 outbreak spreads, many music festivals worldwide have been cancelled. And for Coachella, one of the world's largest music festivals, things aren't looking so good. The massive festival is scheduled to be held in April, placing it right in the path of a potential global pandemic. As students that love music, we decided to take on the challenge of building something that could help hundreds of thousands of people still find a way to celebrate the artists they love.
Like a virtual hackathon, a virtual music festival can be a great substitute.
Our solution? A dynamic three-dimensional music festival simulator that blasts the world's current hottest music, explorable with a Microsoft Kinect sensor. With a wave of your hand, you can jump from genre to genre in a spectacular 3D space, bopping along with animated crowds of randomly-generated dancers made from own 3D models that respond to changing song tempos. Of course, music festivals also prominently feature merchandise, so we added a widget that shows you the top-selling merch for the artist you're currently watching, along with the price and an image.
Because our project features copyrighted music, we decided to upload it to Google Photos. Watch the video demo here.
How does it work?
The simulator is web-based and uses Node.js for the server-side. For the 3D animation, we used three.js, a popular JavaScript 3D library. For the Kinect integration, we used Microsoft's Kinect SDK. As for the music, we used the Spotify Web APIs to get the current top tracks for four different genres (pop, hip-hop, country, and Latin) and play them in the simulator. Those APIs also gave us the tempo data we needed to make our programmatically-generated crowds respond to song speed. We used the eBay APIs to get real-time seller info about merch for the currently-playing artist, including item name, price, and image.
Coachella Simulator incorporates multiple different disciplines.
As a team of three roommates, we've always wanted to combine our own individual interests in a fun project, and this simulator gave us the perfect opportunity to do that. It brings together hardware, 3D animation, and web development in a way that we could only have accomplished by working together and teaching each other.
But wait! There's more...
We had a blast working on this project and plan to continue developing it. Some things we want to add are:
- A personal avatar for the user that matches their dance moves
- Support for any genre the user enters (perhaps via a microphone)
- A "purchase" button in the eBay merch widget that allows the user to instantly buy or bid on a product
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