EXA Is Ready For You

I’ve worked for months designing and building EXA’s many pieces, leaning on my instincts and on feedback from a handful of players. With its foundations in place, EXA is ready for more players, more feedback, and more insight from musicians with different goals and backgrounds.

So now, for the first time, anyone can step into EXA. The VR app is available today on Steam, released as an Early Access title. I hope you’ll try it out, share your feedback to me, and show it to few of your musician friends!

Musical Superpowers

After focusing my development work on VR and AR software for the past few years, I’ve formed a quite few opinions on the subject. Most fall into the realm of interface and interaction and user experience, but some are higher-level.

For example: The greatest “superpower” to be found VR? It’s not flight, or X-ray vision, or the ability to walk through walls. It’s super-human creativity.

Stepping into EXA can activate that superpower.

This new instrument allows you to perform music in ways that feel familiar, but are simply not possible in the real world. It puts an endless combination of musical shapes, sounds, loops, and arrangements under your control. It opens up new worlds of three-dimensional, dance-like, audio-visual performance. Within its virtual space, limitations fade away, and your imagination can flow more directly into tangible, musical realities.

EXA enables you tap into that super-human musical creativity. I can’t wait to see what you do with it.

Strumming through a harp-like collection of EXA’s musical shapes.

Musical Spaces

EXA isn’t the only musical VR app out there. Check out SoundStage and Lyra for two different ways to create music within a virtual space. Like EXA, they both activate those creative superpowers, with each app offering a particular set of strengths that may resonate with your style and goals.

I’m intrigued by the way these developers have approached their musical apps, and interested to see the approaches that future ones take. Some might be broad, seeking to do everything well. Others might be specific, possibly focusing on a particular type of instrument (The Ultimate Woodwind!), genre (Death Metal Gauntlet!), or performance (Dance Dance Creation!).

Yep… I think I’d enjoy playing any of those.

Swooping through a curved piano’s “keys” from above and below.

User Guide

There’s a lot going on when you step into an infinite instrument. For the most part, a little exploration should be all you need to get familiar with EXA, but this user guide might get you there more quickly.

Given its Early Access status, there are still some EXA features that are easy to miss or difficult to discover. In that regard, the user guide is an important assistant until the app’s UX catches up.

Step into EXA

To get started, check out ‘EXA: The Infinite Instrument’ on Steam. EXA works with room-scale setups for Vive and Oculus VR systems (support for smaller and/or 180-degree setups will be coming soon).

If you try it out, please post a review with your feedback and ideas. During this Early Access phase, I’ll be watching these reviews and comments closely. Your input will influence the direction and priorities of the project.

For all those superpowered humans who might make music videos with EXA, please add your video links to EXA’s community hub. I’m excited to see them!