flowstate
a procedurally generated rave visuals experience
ROLE
designer
TIMELINE
March-Apr 2025
TOOLS
Unity
TEAM
inception
Flowstate is inspired by our love for EDM concert visuals, how they perfectly sync to their songs, and the impact they make on our experience. We wanted to create a piece replicating a sense of that environment through Unity, using procedural generation scripts to have our work react to music input.
transformation above physical constraints
We originally wanted to display our visuals on a 2D screen like how we would see it at a typical concert venue. However, we realized that in order to exhibit a 2D visual onto a screen, we would need to build a 3D scene, capture a video of the scene through a camera, then project that onto a 2D screen.
Because of that, we decided to explore innovative ways to confront that challenge while reexamining the definition of a festival. We realized that Unity’s 3D space doesn’t have the physical constraints that humans do in reality, which inspired us to pivot to a surreal 3D festival scene inspired by large-scale art exhibit installations. There would be multiple exhibits on the grounds that transcended the physical limitations of gravity and space, and we imagined our rave goers being able to fly around and peek at the generated art pieces from different angles.
Instead of simply recreating a festival in Unity, we looked to reimagine what a festival experience could be in 3D without the restraints of our physical reality.
implementation
The viewer flies through 2 exhibits through the use of Unity’s cinemachine camera system, tracks, dollies, and timelines. The viewer inputs an audio track of their liking as the audio source and splits the track into its atmos, bass, drum, and synth frequencies to plug them into the frequency analyzers (we recommend tools like Moises, an AI audio separator). This allows the exhibits to generate and respond to their music input using procedural generation scripts, and some portions of the exhibits are randomly generated as well.
