Combine VR and piano lessons
VRtuos Companion App is a free music utility software that works in conjunction with VRtuos Pro, a free VR video game for virtual piano-playing. Developed by Pavel Marceluch, these two are for the Oculus Quest and your real physical piano, allowing for easy instrument studies via virtual reality. This companion program will require an internet connection in order to connect your VR headset and MIDI piano together.
Learn any song
VRtuos Pro is a rhythm VR software that can be used to easily teach and learn piano. It works by displaying falling notes on the piano keys, just like how Synthesia does. You simply have to press the keys as they light up in order to follow along with the music. The game also lets you import songs that you want to learn, as long as they’re in the .MID or MIDI file format.
Take note that this isn’t a piano simulator—it only displays the song’s playable notes as a guide so you still need an actual piano or musical keyboard to use it. You can use whatever type and size of the piano as the software simply calibrates its virtual piano via hand tracking. However, two of the game modes—Learn and Scored—require a MIDI piano because they will recognize your inputs and record your accuracy.
For your MIDI piano to work alongside your VR headset, you need to use the VRtuos Companion App to connect them. To do so, simply choose your input and output device on the companion app, and connect your headset and piano on the same network and IP address. Learn and Scored work best on fast 5G networks. Aside from this, though, there’s not much else to the program.
A necessary tool
All in all, VRtuos Companion App is a nice utility for VRtuos due to the lack of USD cable support between MIDI piano and Oculus Quest. This is practically a required software if you want to try out all of VRtuos’ modes, but it’s a shame that it doesn’t offer any other feature or function. Nevertheless, the developer eventually plans on improving this application, and buying the game to support him will definitely help.