The Villain Lair: Walk Into My Album in VR, on Your Phone or on Your Laptop – AntTheVillain Blog

Most albums live in a list. You press play, you look at a small square of cover art, and the music happens somewhere else. I wanted PHX/L.A. to live in a place. So I built one. **What the Villain Lair is** The Villain Lair is a 3D world on antthevillain.com. You open it in your browser and walk in. There is nothing to download and nothing to install. It is free to enter. You join The Syndicate with your name and email, which is how I let you in and how I get to tell you first when new music and shows drop. Once you are inside, you are standing in my workshop: brick walls, a neon sign that says VILLAIN LAIR, two studio monitors, an arcade machine and a record player on the bench. **What you can do inside** **Play the whole album.** Load the PHX/L.A. CD into the player, or pick any of the ten tracks from the list, and the album plays through the speakers while the room reacts to the music. **Play the Music Glitch arcade.** It is a real game cabinet. Catch the falling items, dodge the glitches, and put your name on the high score board. **Watch the videos.** The TV on the wall plays my music videos. Pick one or let the playlist run. **Walk the Brooklyn alley.** Through the door is a graffiti alley inspired by the one take video I shot in Brooklyn on the day of my first New York stage. The video plays on the wall while you walk toward it. **Shoot hoops in the gym.** Walk through the gym door and you get a 60 second shootout with a scoreboard. Hold to charge, let go in the green zone, and beat your best score. A few more rooms, including the shop, the discography hall and the rooftop, are locked for now. They say COMING SOON on the doors, and I am not telling you what is inside yet. **How to get in** **On a Meta Quest** • Step 1: Open the Meta Quest Browser. • Step 2: Go to antthevillain.com/lair. • Step 3: Join with your name and email. • Step 4: Press Enter VR. • Step 5: Left stick walks, right stick turns, trigger selects. In the gym, grab the ball with the trigger and throw it. **On a phone or tablet:** open antthevillain.com/lair, join, then drag to look and use the joystick to walk. Tap the TV, the record player or the arcade to use them. **On a laptop:** open the same link, click to look around, walk with W A S D and click things to use them. The Villain Lair is compatible with Meta Quest. I have tested it on a Meta Quest 3. If you try it on a different headset, tell me how it feels. **Why I built it** Streaming made music easy to find and easy to forget. A lot of artists put out an album and then watch it disappear into a playlist. I wanted a place that belongs to me, stays open and holds the whole album. I do not have a studio full of engineers or a label team behind me. I built the Lair myself from the 3D scene I made in Blender for the PHX/L.A. project, using standard web technology called WebXR, and put it on my own site where I control everything about it. That is what independent means to me. If the place I want does