Final Project - Lulu's Lair
Lulu's Lair & Lulu Live
The following is one super-writeup of final projects for MUS 206 and MUS 207—Lulu’s Lair (VR world) and Lulu Live (interactive streaming environment). The two pieces of software and the character they involve have so much overlap that they really shouldn’t be separated—so I’ll present them together in one narrative.
First off: the origins of 206’s VR experience: While there’s plenty to say about this piece on its own—the process around how it came to be I feel is equally, if not more, important to discuss. I started off with the concept of a space where an avatar/vocaloid character I’d been developing—named Lulu10tacles—could host events in VR. Lulu’s voice and music grew out of experimentation with Vocaloid software, she first got a body when I discovered the world of Vtubing—and in it the simple avatar creation software VRoid (which maintains an anime aesthetic—that’s why Lulu has the kind of cell-shaded toonish form she does).
This venue I was imagining would be a combination of her/their/its home and a live venue. So I built it out in Unity with a VR setup—which took a long time because I knew nothing about actually modeling in Unity beyond making little cubes etc. But with a lot of tutorials and some modifying of free Sketchfab models—I ended up with her space (I’ll walk through its design later). At this point, I’d planned to convert the space to a VRChat world in which others could visit—but I quickly found out that A) converting to this world was going to be more complex than anticipated and B) the SDK had just gone through major updates making it very difficult to find information online as to how to use it. So I debated the use of this VRChat world—would I actually be able to bring anyone to it? How would I set it up for people to visit when I wasn’t hosting an event if so? What exactly did I want to do with it? And the more I thought about it—the less interested I became in a VR venue, since nobody I know even has a VR headset. I decided to focus on just making the world look really good for a visitor, without an event in mind. I got teleportation working, some basic audio controls, and focused on animating the space to bring it to life. That’s where it is now—one day I hope to improve the music playback abilities and convert the world so folks can visit it—but for now I’m taking a slightly different direction.
Let’s walk through Lulu’s Lair. You spawn in the space facing lulu’s work desk and her gigantic speaker/monitor setup. In an ideal world—this desk would have a really solid interface for listening to music, adjusting mix, etc.—but that level of UI is beyond me at the moment. For now, there’s two levers which control the volume of two track you can assign music to. Audio comes out of the speakers spatialized in 3d. If you turn around, you see the elevator/dive-cage that brings you down to lulu’s space from the surface. You’ll notice floating around above you are submarines and deep sea creatures, and on the ocean floor are giant anchors and sunken ships—we’re deep under-something here, but it’s unclear if that’s water or blood. The giant mountains/waves all around are a deep red, and the sky tints pink—which seems to point to the liquid not quite being normal deep-sea stuff. Why blood? Well lulu’s tentacles suck blood—it’s how she eats people, so ya know there’s that (closest reference I have is like the Kumiho from Lovecraft country—heads up that link’s a tad graphic…). On that front, if you look around there’s also tentacles everywhere around the space, as well as some mutated-looking Venus flytraps. Lulu’s bed has a sort of bone-light tentacle sculpture behind it, and she keeps a few statues in similar veins—a ram’s head (that looks pretty yonic), an ancient penis sculpture, a giant heart, and a huge high-heel. I think all of those, plus the tentacles, really get across her whole vibe. There’s an aspect of study or fascination, an aspect of hotness, and an aspect of performance, to all of her existence—and of course a level of isolation, as she sits at the bottom of some ocean working alone. But it’s cool since she has two red Lambo’s for some reason. On the other cool-for-no-reason-seeming setup she’s got a solid DJ rig in case she ever did host events—I like to think maybe that’s part of her process of eating people. Takes them to this cool lair and plays insane music for people that’s got such intense bass that they explode—then her tentacles eat up the pieces. Kinda gross but I like it.
So now to loop in the MUS 207 side of things—at this point Lulu was ruling my life, I couldn’t tear myself away from Unity and Vocaloid. She was also the topic of my paper for MUS 215 which I’d hoped to eventually present. So I decided to let her consume my one remaining final project for 207—which became a tool for bridging this virtual world of experience and the “real world” of presentation. I wanted to be able to become lulu, take people into lulu’s world, and present things in an engaging and interactive way. Per usual this was a fairly intense order-to-self given I just learned Unity this quarter. But that’s what YouTube tutorials are for.
So I took the world I’d built in VR, but instead set up a stage with a standard camera. I then managed to import my model for Lulu into the Unity space (shoutout VMC) with live control via tracking in VSeeFace. Essentially—I converted some of lulu’s assets into a streaming ready setup where she could appear on Zoom or wherever inside her own space—instead of in just a video chat box. I got a view of my own desktop running in Unity (via NDI) and put it on the screen behind Lulu—this way I could present as Lulu in her 3d world via any streaming platform. I also added Twitch integration (after seeing the insane stuff CodeMiko can do live) so the chat can actually control aspects of the 3d environment in real time. They can print words on the floor behind Lulu, spawn objects into the world, and control the lights. The API work so that basically any sort of in game command can be given via the chat if programed—so there’s really no limit on how far I could take the interactive element aside from my own abilities working with Unity—which is exciting. The possibilities for all of this are pretty wild, and I feel like I’m just scratching the surface here of all the really engaging and interesting things you can do via a custom platform like this. It’s so amazing to not only control the body and the voice of an avatar, but to also control the space they exist in, and to allow others to contribute to that space via live interactions—it’s just so cool to me.
I think the most surprising part of this process wasn’t the results for me—although I was shocked any of it worked—but really how devoted I became to the process. While I love working on creative projects like this, I’m in no way “a coder” by any means—I actually really dislike computer science in general. But something about working to build my own body, my own voice, and my own world really made this engaging in a way few things are to me. It was sort of like being in “the zone” making music for days on end, where I forget to eat or pee or go to bed at a reasonable hour—I just got so lost in it. Building this out felt like a really immersive act of world building, like birthing some version of the self, and I think now that I’ve experienced this process, I’ll be diving in even further in the future. Who knows what else lives in lulu’s world—she surely can’t be alone. The more I put myself into Lulu’s character, the less certain I am of my own identity. The intentionality behind this world and this being have made me really question how intentional other embodiments I take truly are. Where does Max: the person end and Saint Taint: the artist begin? What’s the difference between Saint Taint and Lulu10tacles? Why is any one more honest than the other, more authentic, or more real? Small question—and they’re both extremely exciting as well as truly terrifying and deeply confusing. Like Lulu’s undersea lair/blood dungeon, this conceptual headspace is scary to visit, but viscerally irresistible—exactly the place I want to be.