Playing games that also teach you skills is a dream for any lazy person, but it’s still a distant one. Guitar Hero was fun, but it never taught you to play its starring instrument, and neither will Rock Band VR when it hits Rift later this year.
It’s not really a game, but Teomirn looks like it could be one of the first 3D apps that could actually teach us to play something: the piano. Developed by a Japanese team, this is a HoloLens app that seems so simple in concept that it’s surely got a lot of mixed reality developers wondering why they hadn’t already thought of it first.
Teomirn essentially allows you to mirror the experts with two modes. Syncing up with a real piano, you can choose from a virtual library of songs and then either study them being perfectly played by a pair of virtual hands, or follow along to a color-coded playthrough that allows you to mimic the same pair of hands appearing on a virtual set of keys just above your own.
The idea is to teach mastery through imitation, such as games like Ubisoft’s Rocksmith. Teomirn could go deeper though, by essentially giving you your own personal tutor sitting next to you at any time you need it. What you might not learn is the essential theory behind truly learning to play the instrument, but it’s a good way to get started.
Key to the app’s success will be the library of content supporting it. If Teomirn can be backed up by an ever-growing roster of songs and limitless content then it could flourish into a major music platform in the MR industry.
It’s an incredibly promising concept, even if it would undeniably be held back by HoloLens’ limited field of view at this point in time.
While the app isn’t ready for release yet, the team’s Ayato Fujii told UploadVR that is was looking for partners and investors to help develop it.
