Torin Hopkins, PhD

Extended Reality

AR Drum Circle

Networked musical interaction and real-time collaboration between remote drummers in augmented reality.

Read the paper (PDF)DOI
Drumming with a remote player rendered as an avatar.
Drumming with a remote player rendered as an avatar.

AR Drum Circle is an augmented reality platform for drumming together remotely. Players see each other as avatars in their own space and hear each other over latency-optimized audio, recovering some of the joy and co-presence of an in-person drum circle.

Motivation

Remote collaboration tools typically lack real-time video, spatial information, and per-player volume control, all of which matter in drum circles. Amid the pandemic, networked musical collaboration grew in popularity, but most networks can’t support the near-instantaneous transmission real-time jamming needs.

Investigations

  • An in-depth survey of drumming communication with expert drummers.
  • Observation and analysis of 20 videos of live drum circles.
  • A case study of pairs of remotely located participants using AR Drum Circle, with a head-mounted AR display and JackTrip audio.
  • A comparison case study using a popular conferencing application (Zoom).

Key findings

  • Much communicative information, such as facial expressions, hand tracking, and eye contact, is lost when using AR alone.
  • AR Drum Circle made players less self-conscious and more willing to participate while improvising with others.
  • It retained a sense of co-presence and increased comfort in shared remote experiences.

Gallery

System overview: two locations connected through the cloud, each with a local player and an avatar of the remote player.
System overview: two locations connected through the cloud, each with a local player and an avatar of the remote player.
Avatar designs and the AR experience.
Avatar designs and the AR experience.

Publications

  1. AR Drum Circle: Real-Time Collaborative Drumming in AR

    Torin Hopkins, Suibi Che-Chuan Weng, Rishi Vanukuru, Emma A. Wenzel, Amy Banić, Mark D. Gross, and Ellen Yi-Luen Do

    Frontiers in Virtual Reality, 3:847284, 2022. Open access

    AbstractPDFDOI

  2. How Late is Too Late? Effects of Network Latency on Audio-Visual Perception During AR Remote Musical Collaboration

    Torin Hopkins, Suibi Che-Chuan Weng, Rishi Vanukuru, Emma Wenzel, Amy Banić, and Ellen Yi-Luen Do

    IEEE Conference on Virtual Reality and 3D User Interfaces Abstracts and Workshops (VRW), pp. 686–687, 2022.

    AbstractPDFDOI

IEEE AIxVR 2024

XR Jam

Design considerations for networked jamming with AI-driven musicians and remote players in extended reality.

ProjectPDFDOI