jsdelivrbot / perceptual-cellphone

Perceptual CellPhone

A few years ago I experienced one of the most compelling art pieces at LA County Museum of Art (LACMA) called the Perceptual Cell by James Turrell (http://www.lacma.org/art/exhibition/james-turrell-light-reignfall). I was completely blown away by the fact that with the elements of sound and light I had an out of body type of experience. Thus, the show was sold out for months and months as everybody in LA discovered that you could trip off of sound and light in this crazy metallic sphere at the museum.

At this point in time, I was working as a visualization/software application engineer at NASA JPL and had this freshest prototype of some new tech called the Oculus Rift sitting on my desk at home. It was only a matter of time until my already healthy knowledge of binaural frequencies met up with a virtual sphere of strobing light.

Fast-forward to now, years later. I realized I had this code sitting on my laptop gathering dust. The webGL libraries/components to make the strobing happy for stereo on phones is super fast these days (initially renderTextures weren't a thing when I started this, heh) and I don't need to do a bunch of GLSL shader work to make that all happen with some "barrel shader" effects to play nice with VR viewers. To be honest, I dont even use my cardboard headset with this experience. You can hold your phone, ipad, laptop, etc up near your face and get a great experience to. Glasses, no glasses, doesnt matter. Sweet.

Some pics of what this looked like in real-life (insane!).