Rythmus: Musical Metaverse

Rythmus is a VR multiplayer sandbox developed in Unity as my Bachelor's thesis at the University of Trento. The project explores how musicians can connect and perform together in a shared virtual space, with a focus on the audio latency problem that has historically made real-time musical collaboration over a network impractical.

Players join a shared environment and interact with a virtual xylophone featuring multiple sound presets. The core technical challenge was achieving the sub-20ms latency threshold required for musicians to feel like they are playing together in the same room. This was addressed by integrating the Elk Bridge, a dedicated low-latency audio platform, in conjunction with the Ubiq Framework (maintained by UCL) for multiplayer scene synchronisation.

The thesis documents the architecture, the latency benchmarks achieved, and the qualitative experience of participants during user testing sessions.