On the last day of immersive exhibitions, I saw Roman Rappak’s latest RISTBAND mixed reality live performance experiment, which now has a 4-year streak going at SXSW. This year he added an array of 13 d&b audiotechnik speakers that used wave field synthesis to create a spatial audio mix that was added to his mixed reality performance. I have Rappak recount the evolution of this MR live performance (not using Pico HMDs), and see my interviews about unpacking previous live performances from 2022, 2023, and 2024. Rappak shares that adding immersive art to a live musical performance leaves audiences searching for a story, and if he didn’t provide one then people would make one up. He’s been adding voice-over narration to more deliberately guide the story he’s telling, but also experimenting with spatial audio mixes using high-end speakers. I had a chance to catch up with both Rappak and d&b artist relations manager Wayne Powell (in episode #1536) about his latest spatial audio innovations.
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Rough Transcript
[00:00:05.458] Kent Bye: The Voices of VR Podcast. Hello, my name is Kent Bye, and welcome to the Voices of VR Podcast. It's a podcast that looks at the structures and forms of immersive storytelling and the future of spatial computing. You can support the podcast at patreon.com slash voicesofvr. So continuing on my coverage from South by Southwest 2025, I'm digging into some of the ways that musicians are using immersive media to promote the music that they're working on. And in this case, we're starting to dive into more of the spatial audio section of my series. And there's a couple of podcasts I'm going to be diving into. This first one with Roman Rapic, what the performance he was doing, and then also in DMB, Audio Technic artist representative that was working with Roman is going to be diving into more technical details in the next interview. And then a really amazing spatial audio experience that was one of the last experiences that I saw by Andrew Schneider. It's called... Now is when we are the stars, which is really incredible, especially audio experience. But all these next three interviews are going to be talking around the wave field synthesis, like three interviews in a row and talking around this as a topic. And it's really quite incredible to see how you can start to put together these different rays of speakers and create these audio objects that are spatially located in like an X, Y plane and In ambisonics, you can start to create a sound field, which pretty much sounds the same if you're sitting in the center. But this is a type of audio technique where you're able to really place objects more specifically in different places. And so for Roman, he had been doing a number of different mixed reality performances for actually the fourth year in a row now that he's been at South by Southwest. And innovating and doing these live performances, people putting on VR headsets and having this kind of mixed reality where he's taking people on this journey. He realized that people needed to have some sort of narrative and story. And so he's been thinking a lot around this intersection of this immersive music journey and adventure that also has like a narration and a story. But also this year, he's adding a lot of spatial audio innovations with 13 D&B Audio Technic speakers that are using this kind of D&B soundscape format that is able to place audio objects. So I had a chance to talk with Roman. It was actually in the midst of this very noisy rock festival. the middle of the music video. We really didn't have much where else to go, and so it's a little bit loud with the background noise, so apologies for that. But it sort of gets into the spirit of the DIY guerrilla nature for both of what Roman's doing and just my process of trying to capture all these different stories. So this is the fourth year in a row that I've managed to sit down with Roman to be able to get a little bit of an update as to what he's been doing with the wristband in these live mixed reality performances, and this year with more and more spatial audio. So we're covering all that and more on today's episode of the Voices of VR podcast. So this interview with Roman happened on Tuesday, March 11th, 2025 at South by Southwest in Austin, Texas. So with that, let's go ahead and dive right in.
[00:03:10.531] Roman Rappak: My name's Roman Rapak and I co-founded Wristband, which is a studio that creates immersive experiences and live events and everything in between.
[00:03:21.874] Kent Bye: Great. Maybe you could give a bit more context as to your background and your journey into the space.
[00:03:26.278] Roman Rappak: My background is I'm a musician. I'm a bloke from London who plays in bands, which is probably the most cliched thing you could possibly ever be, but also the least lucrative things you could be. And I signed a record deal and did the amazing things of touring with a band and the things that you kind of promise yourself when you're picking up a guitar when you're 14 that you do. And then that industry has, as anyone who works in the music industry will tell you, kind of collapsed in a lot of ways that it's sort of unsustainable. It's still amazing. Everyone will always go and see live shows. But at the same time, if you look at how many of the sort of small grassroots venues are closing down, if you look at how 100,000 songs are uploaded to Spotify every day, then your chances of turning music into a career and being able to do it full-time are limited. And I think that's a tragic thing because it means possibly we are losing the next Bob Dylan, the next Iggy Pop, the next Ian Curtis, Robert Smith, Dre, whoever. Insert any iconic music figure there. So that kind of sounds quite like it's a depressing point, but rather than getting depressed about it, Our focus has been to look at all the amazing opportunities, like what's different about the world than the world that existed 15 years ago. Things like video games, immersive experiences, experiential events, VR and AR. All these things are new tools and the argument behind Wristband and behind my band Pivots was well why Why are we in the music industry or as musicians complaining about how there aren't any opportunities? And why aren't we exploiting these incredible new technologies, tools, demographics and industries? My true love really in music or my favorite moments of music is the bits where everything is turned on its head, whether it's blues or punk or rave culture or post-punk or hip-hop. And I kind of feel like those always happen because of a technological paradigm shift, whether it's the Stratocaster or the invention of records or the Internet or samplers or synthesizers. And I feel that it's hard to put it all in one context. But immersive experiential VR, AI as well, is part of a new tool set that as musicians, I think there's some really interesting things to explore in it.
[00:05:38.803] Kent Bye: Well, this is the fourth year in a row that you've been at South by Southwest. And I've been at the first two physically. And last year, I saw the build that you were showing as an experience at the South by Southwest experience. And I saw your show that you had this year and your immersive audio installation. And so, yeah, I've been able to cover each year that you've been at South by Southwest. And now we're here at year four. And so maybe you could maybe just take me back to the beginning of like the journey that you've taken and this evolution of the show, because there seems to be like some consistent threads. But each year you're adding something new or different. And last year you had a story element. And this year you have a little bit more spatial sound. But maybe take me back to four years ago when you started to first come to South by Southwest and have this idea of a mixed reality performance with whatever band you were in at the time.
[00:06:24.959] Roman Rappak: I guess the kind of thread that runs through all this is probably it is South by Southwest and what an amazing festival it is and how it is exactly what it was always claimed to be, which is a testing bed for new ideas. It's a haven for independent artists and thought. And I think because as a festival, it's grown so huge that people mistake that for a kind of a distancing of its original ideals. And what I've come to realize is actually it's had to grow because there are so many amazing new artists and there are so many amazing new ideas. But I don't think it's lost its kind of strange, edgy, weird, chic, experimental side. And I think we're a product of it. When we came to that first show that you came to, it was honestly held together with gaffer tape and optimism. And we were using some broken phones that Samsung sort of threw at us. We had a theater that was down the road. We had no one knew what they were doing. We had a broken app, etc. But actually, the excitement of doing something, and this is probably something that's useful to know if you're listeners, is that the crucial thing about this is this isn't a VR experience in the sense of you download it on Steam and you experience it. And it isn't a VR experience in the sense that you go to a table at the Fairmont or at the Cannes Film Festival or the Venice Immersive Festival and you do a thing and that is a VR experience. There's an argument that we're putting forward with this which is The thing about XR that is so powerful is the human aspect of it, which seems so counterintuitive. And it's something that you've always said, which really stayed with me, which is that it's sort of the moment you take the headset off and you see the real world through new eyes.
[00:08:06.091] Kent Bye: So General Lanier, this quote from General Lanier, yeah.
[00:08:08.433] Roman Rappak: Yes, sorry. But I think it's a thread that runs through all the people that kind of actually, as soon as you get over, you know, we've all been there when we first experienced it, just the sheer insanity of, oh, wow, I put this headset on. I mean, well, you're like a sort of a kid with a bazooka, you know, you're kind of like, oh, well, what if I do this? What if I do this? And then you kind of develop the sort of nuance of, well, OK, well, this is good, but this is just a roller coaster. This is a good story. This is this. And so what we've been doing is sort of narrowing down what the story is, how what works and Going back to why South By is great, and specifically Blake Comedina, is that there's no festival on earth that would have let us come back four years in a row refining what we're doing. And not being like, oh, well, that didn't go well or whatever. It's almost like we're being nurtured by South By. And I think that's definitely a Blake thing. Because if you look... South by is so unique in the sense that the head of XR, the guy who's like running the whole show on the immersive side, was a guy that started off as an intern who's a guy who's just passionate about it. And it's a distinction between all the other festivals. You know, you have these real, now that XR is a kind of much more mainstream thing, there's like heavyweight professionals who come in and do it. South by is still kind of indie, I won't swear, but you know, it's indie.
[00:09:25.555] Kent Bye: Yeah, and so you started with the Gear VR, and then you went to, like, Vive, and then, you know, you kind of had headset evolution, but you also had, like, a consistent, like, kind of core idea where people are kind of flying through these virtual spaces, but also kind of flipping into, like, mixed reality. And so as you look at, and I wasn't here last year to kind of see what you're doing, but maybe you could go back to say what the... core innovation was for each year, for the last four years, and catch me up with what happened with your live show last year, and then also what you're doing this year. But take me back to the first time you did it in that theater with 50 different seats and 50 Gear VRs. Yeah, totally.
[00:10:02.259] Roman Rappak: I think also it's useful maybe for me to explain what the idea behind the show is, because especially a lot of your listeners are very well versed in what's happening in the XR space. And I think that there's always a danger that we decide that this medium is meant to be displayed like this. And the film festival circuit, which is actually, the film industry is light years ahead of the music industry in terms of XR. The film industry, you look at the Cannes last year, has suddenly introduced the immersive price. That's like, even though that's a 77-year-old festival suddenly going, oh, okay, well, XR exists, that's still much further ahead than what's happening in music. And so what the show is about, it's about looking at XR as a medium where people... do it together. It's really important that everyone's in a room together. We also, you borrow from all the things about a live show. So what would happen if someone was coming to our show is you queue up and you're there with 25 people, some of them strangers, which for me is so important. It's what happens in cinema. It happens in theater and a concert. You're there with your friends, but you're also there with strangers. But then you all come together for this strange ritual, which is a performance. It's not like everyone's hitting start on their experience in a private room. You're there. The experience can go terribly wrong. I don't know if you can hear the band playing in the background, but for instance, in the last one, a band started playing in the last bit. And I love that because I feel like it creates a strange tension, which weirdly lends itself to XR brilliantly, because there is something... about flying through a world and not really knowing what's next that I kind of think is like, sort of stressful in a way. So the aim is to create a 10 minute experience where people can arrive, there's live music in the sense that I'm performing live, I have control over all the headsets. I can decide how fast the whole audience is flying. I can decide what world they go to. I can decide if I press a certain button that all the pass-through cameras come on so you can see you're back in the real world and you see what's going on. And the evolution of it, I suppose, is first of all as an independent group. We haven't got loads of funding. We just took what we could get. And the first thing we got was Samsung in the Gear VR days gave us a load of phones. Okay, so we used those. Next thing was HTC Vive. HTC, they lent us some headsets. Then we tried speaking to Meta. There was a kind of an ideological issue with some of the team. They didn't want us to work with them. So I've got developers who are real like, you know, people who've got ideals. And I have to respect them because they're a huge part of it. And so no one wanted to work with Meta. And then Pico came forward. And I mean, obviously Pico's ByteDance owned ByteDance. Everything is a complex mess, but Pico have been supportive and they've helped us out, so we've been using them. And the evolution has basically been mostly in terms of storytelling. We thought, when we first started doing it, that if you sit a load of people in a room and you put them in loads of VR spaces and you play music at them, they're going to leave saying, oh, that's amazing. We did that for about six months, and everyone left asking me what the story was. And what's wonderful about human beings is if you're not given a narrative, your brain starts to create a narrative. And so people were coming up to me, and everyone had different interpretations, and people would come up to me being like, you know, my father passed away in a particular part of Eastern Europe, and that building, is it the one because he lived in it? And all this stuff that I thought, okay, we should at least guide the story, which is why we started using a voiceover artist. Eric Todd Dellums, who has been in The Wire and Skyrim and Star Wars. In a way, the biggest evolution has been understanding that there needs to be a voiceover, a narrative, because XR is such a strange, free-floating thing. And everyone who's been in VRChat, I feel like the worst parts of this as a culture are the bits where there's just nothing and you don't know what's going on. I find that stuff more alarming. I love being in a place where someone's being a storyteller or a musician or whatever. Yeah.
[00:14:00.486] Kent Bye: And so there is the narrative parts, but there's also like the social parts. I know that the first year when it flipped into mixed reality, you could see people sitting next to each other. But when you're in the virtual components, you see no indication. Then the next year, the second year, I know that you transform people into these abstract floating comments. And I think it's probably like evolved each year to like this year where you have again flying around but feeling like more of a group but it's like a abstract idealized sense of other people where you can kind of see like human-like behaviors but in what is essentially like this circle with kind of a trail that looks like a comet that's flying around but you can fly around and intersect and then after that you flip people back into the mixed reality where then all of a sudden you see people sitting next to you again in physical space so wondering if you could comment on like the social dimensions there that you're trying to preserve the group and social experience
[00:14:51.946] Roman Rappak: Yeah, I mean for me it's a statement about the fact that I love VR as a medium. My background's a filmmaker and I make music and I write music for films. So for me it's just like the dream medium. Everyone who's trying to take a photograph or write a song or make a film is desperately trying to make you feel like you're in a place or you're transcending something. VR does that as soon as you unsleep the headset, you know. But in a way, it's so powerful that it's kind of like, well, what's the kind of how can you use it in a way that is that has some elegance to it? And so with what we've been trying to do with this is to preserve the things that actually are the most simple things in the world, right? That if you and you and I and ten other friends went to see a guy playing on an acoustic guitar in a bar around the corner, we would have all the ritual of going to see something, which is, we went there together, there was a real moment, there was a beginning and a middle and an end, there was someone on stage who was doing something that has never been done, he'll never play the strings in the same way, or she will never, and there's a possibility of it going wrong, and there's a kind of a ritual that we've entered into and i think that that is if we're talking like what's the aim of of anyone who's putting together an immersive experience all those things in the fairmont today at south by southwest some incredible pieces but what are they all trying to do they're all trying to make the user or the viewer or the player or however you want to term it for a moment buy into a world they've created, you know, as any artist is. And what we found with this is that if you get people to queue up, if you get people to be in a group the same way they did on in theatre or whatever, first of all, it puts them at their ease because it's something that goes back to the Greeks, you know, we're queuing up, we're waiting, the curtain goes up, all these kind of things. but second of all it means that they kind of overlook the like the crap pixelated bit or the low poly bit if we're talking about as a medium what is the goal it's it's immersion and the more immersed someone is the better the experience then getting people to queue up they're already doing a lot of the work before they've gone in they're already buying into the experience and that's something that's been probably the most powerful thing we found
[00:17:01.294] Kent Bye: Awesome. And so I know this year you had a lot of implementing new aspects of spatial sound. Was there anything that you added last year that wasn't there in the second or first year?
[00:17:11.471] Roman Rappak: Yeah, the things that we added last year was lots of haptics. So I love it that when we go to the scene where the whole audience is flying over a snowy mountain that they can feel a cold breeze. The other thing that's a real big kind of addition is we're working with D&B Audio. D&B Audio are like a massive speaker company, but they've got a huge spatial audio component to what they do. which I think is really interesting because they're people that could easily just sell speakers to stadiums for the rest of their professional careers. But they have Wayne Powell, who's a guy who's their artist liaison, and his role is looking out for interesting things done in spatial sound. And actually, any of your listeners who are doing things that are interesting in spatial sound, look up Wayne Powell and D&B Audio, because since we've been working with him, we've kind of been able to move everything up a level. They flew in, you know, like 200 grand's worth of speakers for this tiny tent behind a man. And I think that we're seeing more and more of that, that there's companies that are not seeing XR as... When I first started listening to Voice of VR, It was kind of like niche outside stuff was XR, right? And now we've got like the Vegas Sphere and Abba Voyage, and I think that companies like D&B are hiring people like Wayne, who are kind of the mediators. We would really struggle to communicate what we're doing to people before, like especially in the corporate world, before people like Wayne.
[00:18:36.991] Kent Bye: Can you talk about creating the spatial mix that you're playing tonight?
[00:18:40.673] Roman Rappak: Yes. So anyone who is against the idea of audio nerdery, maybe fast forward 30 seconds at this point in the podcast. The amazing thing is we're so used to music being left and right. There's one speaker on the left, one speaker on the right. But human hearing is so much more nuanced. You have the ability with your two ears to not just say, oh, that's my left and that's my right, to know that a sound is going in your top left or 16 feet away from your left eyebrow. Like we have unbelievable sort of codecs built into us to understand based on how a piece of audio is being translated where an object is. Now... In music, I would argue that listening to the Beatles' White Album or Joy Division's Unknown Pleasures in spatial is a waste of time. It was written to be in stereo and you should listen to it in stereo. But what I think is really, really useful and interesting for spatial audio is XR because it's the first medium where you know where things are because you're in a space and you're seeing where things are. So I think it's a really amazing match and With D&B Audio, we made a mix of this thing. So rather than moving something to the left or to the right, I could move things to in the left row behind the audience or under the foot of the person on the front row. And it really lends itself to a lot of kind of expression, I suppose.
[00:20:01.095] Kent Bye: So maybe you could talk about like how many speakers and is it object-oriented like Dolby Atmos or Unity or like how do you actually do the mechanics of the spatialization across how many of our speakers you have?
[00:20:12.282] Roman Rappak: So in the space that we work with them in London, and by the way, we're doing one at the Science Museum. They've got amazing space. We're doing another experience, one of these in London. Any listeners of Voices of VR, if you reach out to us at Wristband on Instagram and you say you listen to Voices of VR, you automatically get to the front of the queue. But basically, they've got the full system, which is like 62 speakers, subs in the floor. It is probably the most insane audio quality you'll ever hear in your life. Say 64, is that what you said? 64. And the way that it works is when you're using your DAW, your D-A-W, digital audio workstation, you can decide, okay, I want this particular noise, the noise of the train, for instance, in the train scene. It was interesting because I thought, well, when you're in a train, where does the noise of the train come from? And as soon as I started thinking about it, I started thinking about audio in a different way because I'm like, well, the bass is coming from all around you, right? Because it's rattling through the train. But then there's the noise of the tracks in the train. So loads of the medium frequencies and the high frequencies are coming from under you. And it was such an interesting thing, because as soon as I did that, I felt like, oh, god, I feel like I'm on a train now. Whereas if you just played them left and right, it's like, insert train time, whatever. So you're able to move them as objects in answer to your question. So I can say, I want this object to be here and this object to be there. And I'm able to automate them. Is that a plug-in in the DAW? It is. And it's really simple. DMB have made a plug-in, whether you use Ableton or Logic.
[00:21:39.974] Kent Bye: So you're able to put any of the tracks and put like an XYZ coordinate where it should be at and then their array of speakers are able to render it out in a spatial context.
[00:21:49.878] Roman Rappak: Yeah, that's exactly it. I did a mix in a studio in Paris and I moved things around the room and then I went to London to the Science Museum, plugged my laptop in via USB-C and it all just worked.
[00:22:02.779] Kent Bye: How are you previewing it at home? Do you have head-tracked headphones, or how do you do that at home and preview what it's going to sound like?
[00:22:10.866] Roman Rappak: You can preview it to a certain degree. Obviously, it's never like being in there. But the thing about, I sound like a D&B advert. I'm not doing that. But I mean, you can mix it to a certain degree. And if you reach out to someone like Wayne or whatever, you can have access to the studio. If it's an interesting project, especially in the XR space, then you can go in and do it, and do a last mix there, which is what we did.
[00:22:31.443] Kent Bye: But when you're at home, what do you do? Do you render it out to a VR headset? Because there's head track, and I know that there was some 3DOF adapters that you could put onto a headphone and then give that spatial information so that you could turn your head left and right. But I'm just curious if you're at home mixing it, how you get some sense, because obviously you can't spend infinite amounts of time in the studio. So when you're at a home environment, I'm just trying to get a sense of how you start to work with getting a good enough proxy of what it might sound like up until you get into the studio.
[00:22:59.542] Roman Rappak: Yeah, no, that's a really good question. As a spatial audio plugin, you can do a certain amount with headphones, with positional tracked headphones, or even AirPods, really. But, like, I think that those are mostly just a sort of a way of mapping out how it's going to be, and then when you're in those studios. And I think, in a way, it's a good point, and it's about this idea of how... Why is what we think of as immersive and experiential, etc., why is it only happening in... big expensive festivals like Cannes and Venice? Why is it only at the MoMA and the Saatchi Gallery? And actually I think what we're starting to see much more than we used to is there's lots of weird underground stuff because the tools are getting cheaper and the access to those tools is becoming kind of more and more an everyday thing.
[00:23:48.260] Kent Bye: So how many speakers do you have set up in this exhibition for your kind of little VR tent and how many speakers are there in this array?
[00:23:55.422] Roman Rappak: Well, because Wayne's brought in the speakers and because D&B are handling all those side of things, I'd have to go in and count them.
[00:24:02.861] Kent Bye: I think it was probably like six or eight or something like that.
[00:24:05.383] Roman Rappak: And also they calibrate them as we go in. So there's lots of amazing spatial audio companies like L Acoustics, et cetera. Our particular thing is I want to arrive in a venue and be able to say, look, it's all set up in an hour. And what's surprising is a lot of the spatial audio companies are really not thinking like that. And I kind of think of it as sort of an indie mentality, right? Like the thing that will really change the world isn't putting something on that's in the MoMA. it's taking something on the road. Like a little bit like the way post-bunk bands would have done in the sort of 80s, that you go to the middle of nowhere and you play in front of like 20 kids and they go, I want to do that. And actually their bands become the bands that change the world.
[00:24:47.836] Kent Bye: Awesome. And so you also have like a little hidden art place that has like special audio with like some lights. And so maybe you could talk around this kind of like hidden little place that also is having a little bit of a special audio exhibition.
[00:25:00.968] Roman Rappak: Yes. So the idea behind tonight, the wristband event, the official showcase at South Byte, is that we want to show that there are ways that music can get presented using all these new immersive technologies and I guess paradigm shifts that are happening because anyone who's listening to this who's a musician or in the music industry will tell you that the last sort of 15 years or whatever has just been bad news that everything's difficult everything's terrible it used to be better and it's so depressing because I love music and I love going to listen to music And so the challenge was, well, how can we bring what is a band going on a stage and playing their songs into these new paradigms? One being XR, another one being spatial and experiential. And those are quite broad terms. Anyone who's got a band or is a producer or a rapper or whatever, think of the fact that all you have is hoping to get on a playlist on Spotify, maybe playing in a local venue, but most of those venues are closing down. Maybe getting a support slot on another band, but you're gonna lose loads of money. and suddenly there's like what there's the video game industry is the biggest industry that's ever you know entertainment industries have existed the experiential economy is people who would never normally go and see a band or whatever if you show them a cool video of hey look on tick tock here's a cool space in a moment then people come along to it and it's actually that's what that room is it's art the music that you just saw on stage but turned into a spatial audio experience
[00:26:32.099] Kent Bye: Nice. And how many speakers are in there?
[00:26:33.860] Roman Rappak: That's just four. That's how indie it is. Because we did it in Brussels, and the issue is you always meet loads of people who are very technical, and they go, no, you can only do this with this much. Oh, you need 100 grand to do this. And I disagree. I think an immersive experience can be created if you're passionate about it, and you do it in an interesting way. I think people kind of buy into it, you know?
[00:26:57.699] Kent Bye: And maybe you could just also give me a bit of a quick update as to what's happening with Wristband, this kind of social platform that you've been working on for a number of years now.
[00:27:05.768] Roman Rappak: Yes, so Wristband is, we've been very lucky to sort of grow a lot. We are putting on events now all around the world. Since I last spoke to you, we've done festivals in Prague, in Shanghai, in Brussels, London, Paris, etc. And it's all about this interesting, weird grey area, which you cover so well, which is, it's wrong to call it XR or immersive or experiential or whatever. And maybe in 20 years, there'll be one name for it. But I think it's a movement as big as rock and roll or hip hop or blues or Nouvelle Vague or impressionism or pointeism. It's as significant as that. And as with all of those movements, it only really gets defined very near the end. So yeah, a note to anyone listening. As soon as anyone comes up with a name for it, then run because it's over.
[00:27:58.689] Kent Bye: Great. And finally, what do you think the ultimate potential of all these experiential immersive XR technologies and the intersection with music might be and what it might be able to enable?
[00:28:10.837] Roman Rappak: I think, yeah, I think continuing on what I mentioned before, I think the ultimate kind of potential of it is that we arrive at a new way of expressing the essential thing that all art tries to express, which is where are we? Where are we going? Who am I? Have I fallen in love? Am I terrified? And all of those things all at once. And I think that's what any decent art movement needs to express.
[00:28:37.389] Kent Bye: Awesome. And is there anything else that's left unsaid that you'd like to say to the broader immersive community?
[00:28:42.355] Roman Rappak: Yeah, I think if you're someone who creates any kind of content or if you're interested in spatial audio or in VR or XR or if you're 14 years old and you downloaded Unreal Engine and you're completely lost but you really are interested by this, then reach out to us. We're doing events all over the world and we welcome everybody and we just want to push this whole thing forward.
[00:29:06.900] Kent Bye: Awesome. Well, Roman, it was great to be able to catch up with you once again at the South by Southwest. And yeah, I just love the indie spirit. I feel like I've got a similar kind of indie vibe, very guerrilla, just kind of pull yourself by the bootstraps and go do the thing. So yeah, it's just really cool, especially at South by Southwest after everyone's seen all the experiences. It's kind of like the closing night party for a lot of the XR folks because all the experiences close today. It's kind of a nice little annual ritual to go see whatever the latest spatial audio and XR and experiential and immersive experiments that you have going in the music context. So yeah, it was great to see. So yeah, I guess I'll see you next year. Thanks so much, man. Thanks for listening to this episode of the Voices of VR podcast. And there is a lot that's happening in the world today. And the one place that I find solace is in stories, whether that's a great movie, a documentary, or immersive storytelling. And I love going to these different conferences and festivals and seeing all the different work and talking to all the different artists And sharing that with the community, because I think there's just so much to be learned from listening to someone's process to hear about what they want to tell a story about. And even if you don't have a chance to see it, just to have the opportunity to hear about a project that you might have missed or to learn about it. And so this is a part of my own creative process of capturing these stories and sharing it with a larger community. And if you find that valuable and want to sustain this oral history project that I've been doing for the last decade, then please do consider supporting me on Patreon at patreon.com slash voicesofvr. Every amount does indeed help sustain the work that I'm doing here, even if it's just $5 a month. That goes a long way for allowing me to continue to make these trips and to to ensure that I can see as much of the work as I can and to talk to as many of the artists as I can and to share that with the larger community. So you can support the podcast at patreon.com slash voices of VR. Thanks for listening.
