trance is a program designed to aid self-hypnosis by displaying images, animations and text in randomly-generated patterns.

Features

• Randomly-generated: no two sessions are the same.
• Graphical user interface for creating sessions.
• Hardware-accelerated rendering of images, animations and fonts.
• Audio support with multiple independent channels.
• Programmable playlist.
• Oculus Rift and SteamVR support.
• Video export.

Sessions

The creator.exe program can be used to create and edit .session files. This allows full control over the behaviour. Sessions can be launched or exported as video from within creator.exe.

Alternatively, the session player trance.exe can be executed from any directory containing media files. This will generate a default session based on media files found in the directory structure.

Data model

• A theme is a combination of images, animations, fonts and text. Typically each theme combines images and animations with relevant text on a particular subject.
• A program is a selection of themes along with settings to control how they are displayed (e.g. playback speed; what configurations the images and text should be displayed in).
• A playlist determines how the session proceeds. Each item in the playlist is associated with a particular program, determines which item in the playlist should be played next, and can also trigger audio events (e.g. playing a file, fading the volume on a particular channel). In this way, the session can be synchronized with audio recordings.
• A session is a collection of themes and programs along with a playlist.

All parts of a session can be edited with the provided GUI (creator.exe).

Supported file formats

• Images: .jpg, .png, .bmp
• Animations: .gif, .webm
• Fonts: .ttf
• Text: .txt (only used for generating default sessions)
• Audio files: .wav, .flac, .ogg, .aiff
• Video export: .webm, .h264, and (frame-by-frame) .jpg, .png, or .bmp