What is Reality Decks?

So lets give some more detail about what Reality Decks is all about.

Reality Decks gives you a completely virtual DJing setup. Apart from your virtual reality equipment, you need no DJing hardware whatsoever in order to mix music.

When you put on a VR headset you see virtual turntables, a mixer and headphones. You’re in a virtual world, a private night club we call the sphere.

Reality Decks can load music from your hard drive and each track appears as a 12 inch vinyl which you place on the turntable and play. I love the idea of having virtual dubplates without the hassle of cutting them!, and so in Reality Decks each track appears as one 12 inch.

Our aim has been to make this feel as close as possible to a physical turntable. You can move the tonearm, move the record while playing, scratch, adjust the pitch, spin back, slow, nudge, select 33 or 45rpm, even throw away the record if you don’t like it.

The mixer should feel very familiar to DJs. You’ve got standard controls for gain, EQ, fader for each channel. A cross-fader and headphone controls let you cue and mix with precision.

We’re very excited about the headphones. Early on we didn’t quite have an answer on how to cue up a track, i.e. how can you cue up a second track while listening to the first. After much experimentation we realised that the best way was to create virtual headphones. So in Reality Decks you can pick up the headphones and hold them to your ear as you would in the real world. We use spacial audio techniques so that the sound appears to come directly from the virtual headphones. The result is that you can move around the headphones, from ear to ear, or even put them on your head and you’ll hear what you would expect when DJing in the physical world.

We’ve gone to extreme lengths to make Reality Decks feel as lifelike as possible. We’ve been through many iterations of each possible function on the turntable and spent months on the details. We’ve also road tested with DJ and non-DJ friends alike and had to go back to the drawing board many times on simple things like pressing a button! I think we’re finally settling on something that feels as natural as possible.

I’m really looking forward to having more of you try it very soon.