Remote Orchestral Conduction via a Virtual Reality System

This paper envisions the adoption of a Virtual Reality (VR)-based approach to provide visual feedback to remote musicians without the acquisition and transmission of a video stream, in a Networked Music Performance scenario. Focusing on a remote orchestral conduction setup, the VR headset tracks the conductor's gestures to convey them to remotely connected performers, where the conductor's hands and head pose are displayed by means of an avatar. Quantitative results suggest that the Motion-to-Photon latency introduced by the system is tolerable for NMP applications, while the proposed system achieves a substantial reduction of bit-rate requirements in comparison to traditional video streaming.