Welcome to Blind Burners World
Welcome to Blind Burners World. Our home in the Metaverse. This site hosts links to our own experimental VR worlds: Blind Burners Art World; and Blind Burners Playa Experience. We will also host information on third party VR worlds that are somewhat accessible:
- a playground to experiment in navigating 3D spaces via sound.
- a home for screen reader users seeking non-visual access to VR.
- a beacon for art, accessibility and kindness in the Metaverse.
Non-visual access to Virtual Reality?
We use a combination of ‘audio beacons’ and voiced guidance to help make our 3D worlds navigable by sound. If you visit our worlds on a desktop computer, wearing headphones with spatial audio, try tapping left or right to turn your avatar. If you visit us in a VR headset, try turning your head from side to side in VR.
By turning your head while ‘in world’ you will notice sounds moving from left to right, enabling you to work out the direction of each sound. The beacons are loudest at their centre point. At the centre point of each beacon, you will hear voiced guidance, advising you of the audio beacons you may follow to move to your next location. Or feel free to explore the musical soundscapes landscapes. All of our worlds are experiments in navigating, playfully, via sound.
Discover our VR Worlds
Art World
Photography and video performances by blind artists Marimuthu and Ebony Rose Dark, plus Fenbi and Dust Devil. All artworks are audio described in the words and voices of the artists. Visitors navigate by following directional prompts and ambient music inspired by 90s Ibizan electronica.
Playa Experience
Our evocation of one day at Burning Man. From trying to leave camp, to visiting a ‘Temple of Accessibility’, and tracking down the year’s “must see” art piece, an interactive 3D gong bath. In place of the big visual art, drone shows and lasers that often dominate the Black Rock Desert’s horizon, Blind Burners have created a monumental scale piece of 3D sound art. Take a trip through our loosely interpreted galactic sound trail. Visitors navigate this trail by following the spatialised sounds of blind musician Dave Leo Baker. Once you learn how to navigate 3D spaces via sound and instinct, you can track down Elon Musk who is having a strange old time on Mars, visit our blues nightclub on Saturn, head to the loneliness and fragility of life on the outer planets, find a deep playa rave, or listen to some spoken word archival material from Bessie Smith and Mahalia Jackson, and then catch the hyperloop inwards to Venus and Mercury and finally to the Sun.