Paul M. Christian
A body of work spanning VR installations, mixed reality instruments, homemade controllers, hand-tracked puppetry, and live sound-reactive projection systems.
Selected projects
A stationary recumbent bike transformed into a full-body VR airship controller for REM5's ESC 3.0.
Participants pedaled through a 3D scan of the booth, rose through a collapsed roof into a mountain river world, and steered two virtual propellers with a custom physical control inspired by real human-powered airships.
A sandbox for learning, performing, and exploring alternative instrument layouts and microtonal tuning systems.
The platform turns abstract musical objects into playful, spatial instruments: Tonneggs for additive synthesis, rhythm wheels synced to a DAW, and a continuous virtual theremin with formant control.
A mixed reality theremin with a linear pitch field, visible note positions, and ghost-hand performance cloning.
The app preserves the expressive body feel of a real theremin while using mixed reality to make pitch geography visible and multipart performance more approachable.
Systems practice
XR prototyping from concept to embodied install
Sensor, controller, and input-device invention
Spatial audio, synthesis, and instrument design
Realtime visual systems for stages and installations
Playful interfaces for learning complex technical ideas
Project index
Web sound toy
A fractal explorer that maps Mandelbrot escape-time values to harmonic overtones and sequences them with a Hilbert curve.
Live visuals
A rear-projection tarp installation where audience silhouettes merged with sound-reactive visuals across a sidewalk.
Live visuals
A multi-projector Processing environment mapped to analog synthesis, using a virtual camera rig across perpendicular projectors.
2014
A Razer Hydra-based VR glove with 6DOF tracking, homemade bend sensors, vibrotactile motors, and custom object interaction software.
2018
Hand-tracked virtual shadow puppets and VFX Graph visuals used as a luminous backlight for Wayang Kulit at Burning Man.
2019
Hand-controlled smoke, magnetic crystal shards, and dragon magic effects for a digital Wayang Kulit production.
