We went hands-on with Immerrock, a mixed reality guitar training game for Meta Quest.
Last year, for no distinct reason, and certainly not because I’d just trudged through my 40th birthday entering my peak midlife crisis era, I suddenly decided to learn how to play guitar. My new Epiphone Les Paul arrived in two days, and with great excitement, I plugged in the amp, sat down with the guitar cradled lovingly in my arms, and realized I didn’t know how to play. Immerrock, a new mixed-reality guitar learning app/game, seeks to help people like me (and maybe you) learn to shred.
I’ve spent the last few weeks noodling around, learning how best to use the app, and working through the joys and frustrations of VR/MR edutainment. The experience is certainly mixed, and not just “mixed reality.” While the idea of learning an instrument in virtual reality sounds great, in practice, there are quite a few missed notes.
Immerrock is a gamified training program that lets you learn at your own pace, offering 100+ exercises and both long and bite-sized lessons tailored for every level of player. Essentially, the VR headset’s passthrough cameras show us our real-world guitar, hands, and environment, while several HUD and digital user interfaces hover in various places all around us. These primarily take the shape of a hovering fretboard, digital representation of our hands and fingers, and a scrolling note display.
Want an easy comparison? Immerrock is an educational Guitar Hero, but that’s something of a reach. Where Guitar Hero was exciting and flashy, loaded with the most popular guitar songs ever recorded, Immerrock is a bit bland and stayed, and loaded with lots of royalty-free public domain tunes.
At the core of the experience is what I call the “note highway,” a streaming display where colored bars representing notes stream toward you in time with the music. The aim is to place your fingers on the appropriate strings and frets and strum in time with visual stimuli.
Numerous tools are available to help you learn. You can choose the complexity of songs based on your comfort level and ability, alongside adjusting the speed at which songs play. There’s also a series of specialized training exercises.
But here’s the problem. So much of learning guitar hinges on creating muscle memory, subconsciously linking your brain with your fingers so that your fingers can do what they’re supposed to do without conscious input from your mind. The only way to achieve this is through reps, successfully putting your fingers where your eyes are looking and hitting the correct string and fret at the correct time.
That is so difficult to do when what you’re seeing with your eyes doesn’t match the reality of what you’re feeling with your hands. When playing Immerrock, the digital representation of your hand gets jittery and things feel imprecise. The fingers sometimes do weird things, which isn’t necessarily catastrophic, but it’s distracting. Also, the peripheral distortion of the headset’s lenses adds another dimension of uncertainty to what we’re seeing.
I played Immerrock on a Quest 3S, and perhaps this whole experience would be different on a headset with higher specs. I’m not convinced, though. I think the tech just isn’t ready for something as fine and precise as playing guitar.
A couple of additional notes here. For one, there’s this interesting thing that happens when learning guitar (or when hyper-focusing on any difficult task, really). When you do it for a period of unbroken time, let’s say an hour, you eventually reach a distraction-free flow state. When I’m practicing guitar without distraction, I eventually become super relaxed, hyper-focused, blissfully detached from everything but the music and my brain and body that are making it.
With Immerrock, I never reached that flow state. Not once. And I think I know why. To start, the previously noted disconnect between reality and what the app was showing me, and the other reason has to do with shellfish and headsets.
Assuming the very best circumstances possible, practicing guitar is painful. It can hurt your fingers, neck, spine. I’ve even hurt my toe practicing guitar (I dropped it). Then consider the additional strain of a VR headset, when you’re sitting with your head tilted forward and your chin on your chest, watching the fretboard and your fingers for a half hour straight. Doing so with a 1.25 pound weighted headset strapped to your forehead, things become unbearable very fast.
Your neck hurts. Your spine takes on the posture of a shriveled shrimp. You’re never allowed to just relax and chill and play and focus. You’re always adjusting the headset, always fiddling with the virtual UI, always being annoyed during a process that’s supposed to be fun and one that requires total concentration.
To Immerrock’s credit, the game is highly customizable. Placing my virtual fret bar exactly in the right place helped a lot. Choosing a song that appealed to me helped, too. And the game works well, no mistake. But it never quite feels right, no matter how hard I try, nor how many settings I fiddle with, nor which song or lesson I choose.
The concept is genius, but the tech is just out of step. When headsets weigh nothing (or close enough) and passthrough cameras render flawless 1:1 video of the world around us, Immerrock will be perfect. We’ll be effortlessly shredding, building calluses, nailing barre chords as easily as we once smashed the floppy Tonka Truck buttons of our giant, plastic Rock Band guitar.
For now? If you are a new guitar player looking to learn the basics of finger placement, chord transitions, strumming, and building crucial muscle memory, flatscreen apps like Gibson’s App or Fender Play on a tablet or phone still have the edge over VR/MR guitar training.
With these apps, the screen is stable while the visuals are clean and precise. Your posture won’t resemble a shellfish in distress, and if my experience over the last six months is typical, you’ll make far more progress with these training methods than would be achieved with Immerrock’s admittedly very cool, unfortunately imperfect tech.
Immerrock is available now in early access for $11.99 at the Meta Quest store.