Imagine, if you will, a nightclub where the floors vibrate to the music with embedded transducers and the walls are two way windows connected to a virtual reality club with the same theme and music. The DJs digital avatar is rocking the party on the ceilings, motivating people in both worlds to dance together along the shared walls of their physically distant environments.

Welcome to HiveNBar, a real life dance space that is linked to a virtual dance space, with overlapping music and windows from the virtual world to the real and vice versa. Bangzheng Du, the visual artist who created the original Hive-N-Bar artwork, has generously given me his permission to use his creation in exchange for promotion of his website, dbz.artstation.com

In addition to being a fun place to gather and interact, I’m interested in using this project to raise awareness of colony collapse disorder in honey bee populations. “U.S. beekeepers lost 43.7% of their honey bees from April 2019 to April 2020. That’s the second highest rate of decline the researchers’ have observed since they started the survey in 2006.” -https://earther.gizmodo.com/a-record-number-of-bees-died-last-summer-1844120999

I am also interested in creating other XR dance experiences that raise awareness of other pressing social issues. The goal being to entice people into shared spaces with the lure of a fun dance party, and allow their exploration of the spaces to lead to new insights and discoveries that I hope will encourage positive changes in the real world and even in the virtual world.

Click here for a virtual tour of HiveNBar: hivenbar.com

Below are 3D models I had made for the soon to be developed HivNBar VR experience 
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