Years ago, early in his professional DJ career, Algorithm founder and CEO Karim Morsi found himself performing at the tower of a castle on the Italian coast. Below him, many people dance in the ruins; Before him stretched the moonlit coast and the Mediterranean Sea. “It was a very encouraging environment,” says Morsi, perhaps underselling it.
In their application DJ, Morsi and Algorithm have worked to recreate that live DJ experience for nearly 20 years. The best-in-class DJ app for Mac began life as out-of-the-box software; Subsequent versions of the iPad introduced features such as virtual rotation and bit matching. The app was a huge success, winning the Apple Design Award in both 2011 and 2016.
But Morsi says that all previous work was a prelude. DJ On an endless canvas. “When we heard about Apple’s Vision Pro, I felt it,” he said. DJ It was this beast that he wanted to unleash. Our vision — no pun intended — was to make DJing with Algorithms accessible to everyone,” he says. The Apple Vision Pro represents the realization of that dream. “The first time I got the device, I was very emotional. Ever since I was a kid, I wanted to be a DJ. And suddenly these turns, and the night sky, and the stars above me, and this light here in the desert. ‘This is the culmination of everything. That’s the feeling I wanted people to experience.’
When we heard about the Apple Vision Pro, it felt like it. DJ It was this beast that he wanted to unleash.
Karim Morsi, Founder and CEO of Algorithm
To reach that end required what Morsi called “the most amazing race of our lives.” With a 360-degree canvas to explore, the team reimagined the entire process of how people interact. DJ. “During ten years of building DJ interfaces, we realized we were taking a lot of things for granted,” he said. “So he went back to the drawing board for the first part of Apple’s Vision Pro design and said, ‘Okay, maybe this made sense 10 years ago with computers and mice, but why do we need it now?’ Why do people have to press the button to match tempos – shouldn’t this be seamless?’ There was so much we could get away with.
They also thought about the environment. DJ It features a windowed view, 3D turntables that bring you into your environment, a shared space and multiple forms of full immersion. The app first opens into a windowed view, which should feel familiar to anyone who’s spun on an iPad app: a simple two-story UI. The volumetric view brings not only the folding tables into your room, but also the key moment of the application: the floating 3D cube. DJEffects control pad.
But those immersive scenes are where Morsi feels people can truly experience responding to and consuming the environment. An LED wall that reflects colors from the artwork of the currently playing song, a nighttime desert scene framed by a light stage and a space lounge – complete with dancing robots – that offers a great view of planet Earth. The goal of those environments is to help create the “flow state” required by live DJs. “You want to get into a loop where the environment affects you and vice versa,” says Morsi.
Ultimately, this incredible use of technology serves a very simple purpose: interacting with the music you love. Morsi – himself a musician – points to the piano he keeps in his office. “That piano has had the same interface for hundreds of years,” he said. “That’s what we’re trying to find, that sweet spot between complexity and ease of use. with DJ At Vision Pro, it’s less ‘let’s give people the bells and whistles’ and more ‘let’s give them this experience’.