Breath
The Second VR Pop Single From The Indelicates

If you were paying attention to us about 6 months ago, you'll likely remember, vaguely, that we were making a big deal about how we were releasing the first Virtual Reality Pop Single exclusively for the Oculus Rift. And that was cool - and if you were among those who came round our house to have a go on it, you probably dug it.

However, we knew at the time that there was an inconvenient venn diagram that was standing in the way of our attempts to actually distribute the single. It looks like this:



Marketing experts will have spotted the flaw already.

While we are totally behind the idea of releasing music in formats that no one has the means to play in theory - it seemed a bit of a shame in practise.

So, this time, for our second VR Pop Single, we decided that it might be better if we targeted hardware that was actually on sale to the public. And the thing is this - the Oculus Rift is amazing: it has ultra low latency, a wide field of view and spectacular optics, but it has a downside: you don't have one. The Google Cardboard, on the other hand, is a piece of cardboard that you can use with your phone and that looks like this:



It's nowhere near as good as the Rift - but it's way, way better than it has any right to be. If you're new to VR, the basic idea is that there's a 3D world that knows (based on the accelerometers and gyroscopes inside your phone) which way your head is pointing and that updates the view in realtime to give you the illusion that you are actually present in the virtual space.

We love the idea of VR as a medium for music because we think it brings back the old fashioned idea that you can pay undistracted attention to it - like a modern listening booth. The constant distractions that leave us restless and never bored prevent us from doing what we used to when we listened to a record: we no longer drift off into our own little worlds. We think that with VR, we can include a little world for you to drift off into as part of the package. These singles aren't videos - they aren't rendered and passive - rather they are living worlds that contain elements that react to you and your actions as well as to the music.

We'd be lying if we said that this wasn't a technology in its absolute mewling infancy. It's good, but it will all get so much better - we think we can offer a glimpse of a way that music could be consumed in the future and we're pretty smug about that, to be honest. You'd want to slap our faces if you saw the way we're smirking.

So - you need a google cardboard. The headset is open source, which means you can download the blueprint, cut out your own card, buy some lenses and put one together yourself, or you can buy one ready made from any of the many people who are selling them online for around $20/£15 - or BEST OF ALL, you can buy a special Indelicates branded one from us as part of the crowdfunding drive for our NEW ALBUM. Once you have one, you can download the single for free from either the Google Play Store for Android or the iOS app store for iPhone and that's it - you can see what we've been on about and bring the circles on that Venn diagram a little closer together.