Peavey & Behringer Showed Off HoloLens at Winter NAMM Music Covention

A few days ago, there were flying piranha, snakes, and dragons roaming around freely at the Anaheim Convention Center in California, but they weren't real or even hallucinations—they were holograms brought to life with the Microsoft HoloLens.

The National Association of Music Merchants (NAMM) puts on a semi-yearly convention for the music instrument industry similar to what CES is for electronics. A large portion of instrument manufacturers put together large and loud demonstrations to woo market buyers into stocking their products and showing off the latest and greatest releases for the year.

This year, Peavey Electronics, a well-known company that produces everything from speakers and mixing boards to guitars and basses, brought along a few HoloLenses to show off their instruments and amplifiers in a different light—a holographic one. In the video below, you can see the mind blown reactions of musician and sales reps as they put on the HoloLens to see a snake, flying piranha, or giant dragon, which correlates with Peavey's Vypyr VIP series, 6505 Piranha Micro Head, and other products.

Peavey Electronics was not the only company trying to make a splash at NAMM with the HoloLens. Behringer was there promoting their newest synthesizer, DeepMind 12— the subject of my very first post on NextReality—and demonstrated using a Hololens as a unique control scheme for a making sounds with a keyboard.

In the video below, you can see what the keyboardist is seeing in the background on the screens, as he moves his hands around moving holograms—without any air taps, mind you. I am pretty certain that this will probably be my next synthesizer.

We have already seen other music-related uses with the HoloLens, such as Music Everywhere, HoloKeys, and music controllers, and we will likely see HoloLens be applied to music more and more in the near future. Music is about expression, and the HoloLens offers a new dimension to the potential types of expression that currently exist. I expect artists of all sorts to go crazy for this technology.

What instrument can you imagine using your HoloLens with? Let us know in the comments.