VIRTUAL DAYDREAMS: Those who see Shaun Oster, aka Doublehead, drum tonight with the Ben Wilmore Trio at Seven Bar & Kitchen will be certain of at least one thing: The man can drum. However, what they may not know is that he can do all kinds of things. He can heal you with water therapy, design a website, engineer a sustainable backyard aquaponic system, ride a gyroscope-powered unicycle, and brew an uncommonly good salted-caramel latte, and he usually does all these things within the course of an average day. Perhaps most impressively of all, however, is that he is also the creator of a virtual-reality world of his own design, soundtracked by his own music, and you are welcome to explore it on your own.
Enter Infinity Equals One VR, the world’s first virtual-reality album. Put on a pair of Oculus Rift goggles, and suddenly you are walking in a living room as Oster’s electronically tinged rock music plays. Knock on this door, and you find yourself on a tropical island; knock on that, and you are in a magic world where mushrooms shrink you to a tiny size, all while Oster’s music envelopes you in its Super Mario 64–esque digital world.
Oster, a spiritual techie and scientific shaman both, likes to live on the frontiers, and saw in the new Oculus Rift virtual-reality device unexplored opportunities for promotion. “What’s a creative, clever way to grab people’s attention?” he wondered, and looked toward the 200,000 people with Oculus Rift development kits “waiting for something new.” He researched the technology needed for virtual reality apps and found a programmer in Taiwanese developer Kevin Sang, who helped Oster realize the world in his mind. “I realized once you get into virtual reality, you can do anything you can imagine,” he said.