What if you could make music while sculpting a human face with your hands in virtual reality?
A new experiment, made available on the web by Mozilla's VR team via the WebVR API, aims to show us exactly what that looks like when using VR in a Firefox browser.
[seealso slug="ultrasonic-haptic-feedback"]
Developed by Isaac Cohen (aka Cabbibo), Rainbow Membrane is a virtual reality experience that allows you to produce sound by manipulating a virtual face, and the walls around that face. The dynamic is made possible by pairing an Oculus Rift (for immersive visuals) with a Leap Motion (for hand gesture detection).
Using those hardware components with the software, the user is able to push, pull and mold the virtual environment to produce any number of psychedelic visual flourishes as the software's audio feature produces musical tones corresponding to your "touch."
Of course, Rainbow Membrane would be even more immersive if haptic feedback gloves were introduced to provide a sense of touch to the virtual environment, but this is still a good start toward getting us accustomed to manipulating objects in VR.