Heck of a bump here, but I just finished listening to Vulnicura for the first time... and I decided that for my Bjork deep dive I do my best to find the most "immersive" version of it, and well... the VR version is currently the best "immersive" version of Vulnicura.
Getting it up and running was, in it's own special way, more of an experience than the experience itself, as I had not used my Oculus (better name than Meta, damnit!) Quest 1 in over a year, meaning not only did I have to charge it up, but also update it's software, log into Facebook... twice... port my Facebook account to a
Meta Account, update all my apps, etc.
Once I did get that all up and running, I used Virtual Desktop to stream it from my PC on Steam to my headset, and set up an office chair in the middle of my space to spin around in (which was ABSOLUTELY the right call. While most VR experiences do have full 360 environments, most really only focus on the 180 degree wedge in front of you... except this. It seems like Bjork wanted to show off by really making you spin around as much as possible).
Vulnicura VR has you navigate from song to song by exploring a virtual, what I have to assume is Icelandic, landscape. Strewn about are aspects that would be impossible in real life, such as a large rocky mass with what looks like a human draped over it (remember that), rocks that curl up like claws, and more.
Each song has two "modes", a music video/performance of a sort, and a "score" mode, a sort of abstract shape representation of the sheet music, very much inspired by
Artikulation.
The bulk of the experience is the existing music videos. Stonemilker is presented in it's existing 360 Music Video, Lionsong is it's 2D music video... but obscured behind a circular-ish cut out with tree roots ornamenting the top and bottom, Black Lake is an interesting two screen set up, with two screens positioned about 180 degrees opposite each other, causing you to have to turn around and around to catch the next bit of it (though the second screen is always showing
something). Mouth Mantra is a particularly horrifying 360 adaptation of it's existing flat music video, primarily taking place
inside Bjork's mouth.
Not every song has it's own experience however, History of Touches and Atom Dance are only available in the score mode. Presumably because the back to back one-two punch of Family and Notget are where most of the budget seems to have gone: fully 3D, motion captured Bjork dancing around your space, dissolving, glowing, growing (at one point about as big as a building), shrinking and multiplying. Family culminates in that large rocky mass with what looks like a human draped over it being (surprise!) Bjork in her final pose, while Notget has her slowly be ripped apart by a black mass of tentacles in the sky. If the rest of the experience was like Family and Notget it would be highly recommended, IMO, but those are the only two tracks that really showcase the tech.
The binaural audio did sound quite good. Elements are definitely discrete, though I cannot comment on how well it converts the album since, well, this was my first listen. Poking around in the files after experiencing it, I didn't find any obvious audio files (though I did find all the video files for the music videos interestingly enough), but I do see files from
Wwise, which is what I would have guessed they used as the audio engine core. Wwise more or less is
the audio toolkit for high end games (there are others like FMOD, but Wwise tends to market themselves more). It is a Unity project, which means if I remember the arcane way to un-compile a compiled build I could crack it open and possibly find workable audio files, but that's a larger project than I care to sign up for right now.
Is it worth the expense and hastle of VR? Definitely not. Something worth checking out if you have a VR ready PC and a VR headset? Yes.
