PatchWorld press kit cover for the VR and desktop music creation platform

Latest press release (20 December 2024):
Hand Tracking in PatchWorld frees your hands to explore, rewire, tweak, and play music like never before

PatchWorld: Make Music Together in VR and Desktop

PatchWorld is a multiplayer music creation platform and spatial audiovisual playground for VR and desktop where people make music together, build instruments, create reactive worlds, and perform live with others in real time.

Created by Swiss creative technology studio PatchXR, PatchWorld turns music creation into a spatial, embodied, multiplayer experience. Instead of working only on a flat screen, creators step inside a shared 3D world where sounds, visuals, instruments, objects, logic, and performance can all be patched together by hand.

PatchWorld is built for musicians, producers, performers, educators, world builders, and curious creators — from beginners discovering music through play to advanced users designing complex modular systems, audiovisual shows, and interactive worlds.

Current News

PatchWorld is coming to Steam

PatchXR is bringing PatchWorld to Steam, opening its immersive music-making and world-building platform to a wider audience of PCVR and desktop creators.

Already available across major XR platforms, PatchWorld’s Steam release marks an important step toward making collaborative music creation in virtual worlds more accessible to musicians, producers, audiovisual artists, educators, and creative sandbox players.

On Steam, PatchWorld expands beyond headset-only discovery and invites a broader community to build, jam, perform, remix, and share creative worlds from both VR and Desktop.

If you already play PatchWorld on Meta Quest, you can log in with your existing account on Steam to access your Vibz, purchases, worlds, and assets across desktop and PCVR. Steam access still requires purchasing the Steam version, as each store manages app licenses separately.

Steam status: Coming soon / Early Access

Wishlist PatchWorld on Steam

Short Description

PatchWorld is a multiplayer music creation platform for VR and desktop where users make music together, build instruments, create reactive worlds, and perform live in real time.

Long Description

PatchWorld is a spatial audiovisual playground for VR and desktop - a place where music is not only composed, but built, touched, inhabited, and performed.

Developed by PatchXR, PatchWorld combines music creation, modular instrument building, interactive world design, and real-time multiplayer collaboration in one shared immersive environment. Users can step into virtual and mixed reality spaces, grab instruments with their hands, connect modular blocks, trigger sounds through movement, create reactive visuals, and perform live with collaborators anywhere in the world.

Inspired by modular synthesis, visual programming environments such as Pure Data and Max/MSP, and hands-on electronic music culture, PatchWorld brings patching out of the flat screen and into shared immersive space.

Unlike traditional music software, PatchWorld does not separate making, playing, and performing. The creative process happens directly in space. A synth can become a sculpture. A rhythm machine can become a world. A performance can become a playable environment. Sounds, visuals, physics, avatars, logic, and interaction all speak the same patching language.

PatchWorld is accessible to newcomers through ready-to-play worlds, guided jams, and beginner-friendly instruments, while also offering deep creative power for advanced users. Musicians and producers can build custom instruments, explore spatial sound, connect to external workflows through MIDI, OSC, and Ableton Live, and use PatchWorld as a new kind of immersive studio. Educators can use it as a collaborative music-learning environment. Artists and performers can create audiovisual shows, interactive installations, and hybrid live formats that would be impossible on a flat screen.

PatchWorld is part of a growing movement around social music in XR: a future where people do not only listen to music in virtual spaces, but create, remix, perform, teach, learn, and build culture together inside them.

Key Features

Make music in VR and mixed reality

Play synths, samplers, drum machines, sequencers, effects, spatial instruments, and community-made devices in immersive 3D space.

Build your own instruments

Use PatchWorld’s modular block system to create custom instruments, effects, sequencers, controllers, visual systems, logic devices, and interactive worlds.

Collaborate in real time

Jam, build, teach, rehearse, and perform with other users inside the same shared world.

Create reactive audiovisual worlds

Connect sound, movement, visuals, lighting, physics, and interaction so music becomes part of the world itself.

Import and generate assets

PatchWorld connects immersive creation with external workflows: users can bring in their own sounds, images, and 3D objects through the web portal, or generate new assets in-world with AI-powered tools.

Customize your identity and presence

Import custom VRM avatars, create expressive costumes, and shape how you appear and move inside PatchWorld’s shared creative worlds.

Perform live

Host concerts, workshops, jam sessions, audiovisual performances, and hybrid live events.

Connect to professional workflows

Use PatchWorld with MIDI, OSC, Ableton Live, external controllers, desktop tools, and hybrid studio setups.

Learn, remix, and publish

Explore community creations, remix existing devices, learn through workshops and tutorials, and share your own worlds and instruments on the marketplace.

What Makes PatchWorld Different?

PatchWorld is not a rhythm game and not a traditional DAW.

It is a new kind of spatial creative tool where music, visuals, performance, and world-building are part of the same system.

In a rhythm game, players follow music.

In a DAW, producers arrange music on a screen.

In PatchWorld, creators build musical worlds and perform them from the inside.

That makes PatchWorld especially powerful for social music-making, electronic music, audiovisual performance, education, and experimental creation.

Community

PatchWorld is home to an active, passionate, and welcoming community of musicians, artists, educators, builders, and curious creators — curious beginners to expert patchers. Through Discord, workshops, live jams, performances, and shared worlds, users help each other learn, troubleshoot, remix, and create together.

PatchXR is especially proud of the community’s openness and generosity, including its strong LGBTQ+ presence and its welcoming atmosphere for people of different backgrounds, identities, abilities, ages, and levels of experience. PatchWorld is not only a creative tool; it is a living social space shaped by the people who build, play, and perform inside it.

PatchWorld and Education

PatchWorld is increasingly used as a hands-on environment for music learning, workshops, and collaborative experimentation. Students and beginners can play instruments, improvise together, build rhythms, explore melody and harmony, experiment with sound synthesis, and create audiovisual pieces inside the same shared space.

Because sound, movement, visuals, logic, and spatial interaction are visible and playable in 3D, PatchWorld can make abstract musical concepts such as rhythm, sequencing, modulation, signal flow, and structure more embodied and intuitive. It also supports interdisciplinary learning across music, visual art, animation, physics, logic, and creative technology.

PatchWorld has been explored in educational and research contexts, including the LEVIKO-XR programme, where it is used to investigate collaborative music creation and XR-based learning.

Inclusive and Accessible Creation

PatchWorld is designed around the idea that music creation should not depend on one fixed instrument, interface, or way of playing. Because users can build and adapt instruments, controls, and interactive systems, PatchWorld can support more inclusive approaches to music-making.

Interfaces can be remapped, simplified, expanded, or co-designed around different physical, cognitive, or sensory needs. This makes PatchWorld especially relevant for accessibility-focused projects, inclusive education, therapeutic creative contexts, and new forms of ability-led instrument design.

PatchXR is actively interested in collaborations that explore how XR can expand access to musical and audiovisual creation for people who may be excluded by traditional instruments, studio tools, or performance environments.

PatchWorld is part of a broader research and cultural ecosystem exploring the future of music in immersive environments. Through projects such as MUSMET — Musical Metaverse Made in Europe — and accessibility-focused collaborations, PatchXR investigates how XR can support new forms of collaborative music-making, remote performance, education, inclusion, and social presence.

These collaborations position PatchWorld not only as a consumer creative platform, but also as a research tool, educational environment, and testbed for the future of musical interaction in shared virtual and mixed-reality spaces.

Testimonials

“This is the future of music! Musical worlds you can inhabit, interact with and become part of. A completely psychedelic, immersive experience. I love it!”

— @Metamat, music producer

“Excellent tool for music production, with an active and friendly Discord community. The recent addition of DAW integration may well make this app the future of VR music production.”

— @Magnet, music producer

“PatchWorld enables an embodied, playful, and collaborative approach to music-making that lets learners create and experiment freely beyond the physical and conceptual limits of traditional instruments and classroom settings.”

— Leonard Bruns, researcher and music educator

“PatchWorld is a fantastic design space for researching and building unique accessible instruments supported by a wonderful community of virtual music engineers.”

— Damian Mills, researcher and musician

About PatchXR

Named one of Fast Company’s “Most Innovative Companies,” PatchXR is an award-winning Swiss creative technology studio building new tools for music, immersive media, interaction design, and live performance.

Since 2020, PatchXR has developed its own bespoke engine and creative platform, PatchWorld: a multiplayer music creation platform and spatial audiovisual playground where users can make music, build instruments, create reactive worlds, and perform together in real time.

Led by artist, CEO, and co-founder Mélodie Mousset and musician, sound designer, and co-founder Gad Baruch Hinkis, PatchXR combines artistic research, music technology, spatial interaction, and multiplayer systems to develop new ways of creating, playing, and performing together.

Quick Facts

Product: PatchWorld

Developer / Publisher: PatchXR AG

Based in: Volketswil, Switzerland

Current leadership: Mélodie Mousset and Gad Baruch Hinkis

Founded: December 2020

Team size: 5

Category: XR music creation / live audiovisual creative playground

Platforms: Meta Quest, Pico, HTC VIVE XR Elite, PC/Mac Desktop, Steam for PCVR and Desktop

Main audience: Musicians, producers, audiovisual artists, educators, XR creators, creative sandbox players

Core experience: Make music, build instruments, create reactive worlds, perform live, and collaborate in real time.

Key differentiators: Modular block system, real-time multiplayer, world-building, mixed reality, hand tracking, PCVR and desktop support, Ableton Live integration, MIDI, and OSC

Record label: PatchWorld Record is the first label dedicated to music created entirely in VR/XR, launched in December 2025

Awards & recognition: Auggie Awards, AUREA Awards, Fast Company, Abbey Road / music:ally, IEEE

Store links:

Website: https://www.patchxr.com

Regular Price:

Steam Early Access: $49.99 / €49.99

Meta Quest: $29.99

Business model: Try Before You Buy on Meta Quest; paid Early Access on Steam

Account content: Vibz, purchases, worlds, and assets can be shared across supported platforms when users log in with the same existing PatchWorld account. Steam and Meta Quest app licenses remain store-specific.

Press / Business contact: press@patchxr.com

Wiki: https://wiki.patchxr.io

Web Portal: https://portal.patchxr.io