Seeing your favorite artist in person is one of the best feelings in the world. As
a performer myself, I love the energy of DJing to a packed house. What if that
feeling could be replicated in virtual reality? Watching a concert in VR is not
a new concept. Many artists have done 360 videos of their shows. But Imogen Heap is
taking it one step further by creating a hologram like version of herself in VR.
Imogen has always been at the forefront of emerging music technology and her new
project is no difference. We're here in the UK to learn about an immersive VR
experience she's created with TheWaveVR.
So welcome to the underground of my studio. It's so cozy. It's nice it doesn't
feel like your normal studio. Imogen Heap is a Grammy
Award-winning musical artist, producer and audio engineer, known for her
boundary-pushing electronic music. Both as a solo artist and in groups like Frou
Frou. Her interest in technology has led to projects such as her gesture
controlled Mi.Mu gloves and Mycelia, a blockchain project for musicians.
Now she's tackling virtual reality. These are bits of keyboards. To be honest, I don't really use that
much anymore. I do actually use these quite a lot. Thunder and lightning.
So why did you want to create a VR experience? Well it was always on the
cards eventually in my life. I suppose for me when it really clicked was
when I had my first proper immersive VR experience. Thanks to TheWaveVR and Adam
Arrigo from WaveVR was doing a demo. But actually for me the real magic came when
I was interacting with Adam in the space and I realized that I felt so much
closer and more connected that it wasn't this kind of distant magical space it
was this real like human interaction. There was a sense of "Oh actually this is
quite normal but there's something everyday about this. There's
something you know that I could bring into my music life with this.
Experiencing music in VR has been around for a while but unlike other companies
the way VR features a social component and designs custom environments where
users can interact with each other while at the same show. They've also created
these social virtual reality experiences for artists such as Toki Monsta, The
Glitch Mob and Kill the Noise. I went to talk to Adam at TheWaveVR to learn
more. So why do you think VR is the future of music? You know our central
mission is about kind of harnessing the power of VR technology and leveraging it
to create a visual experience and interactive experience, social experience
that you just couldn't have at a real show. So we think that the future of
music is probably something that combines all of those elements. Its not
just about how music gets performed or distributed in a new way, but how people
socialize around it, how its visualized. And you mentioned something about the
social aspect of it and I think that's really interesting because I think
people find going to a concert to be a very social experience in it of itself. So how
does that change in VR? Yeah, one of the cool things about TheWave, we just
launched internationally and when you go in there for these shows you actually
meet people from around the world. One of the cool things about social VR is that
it kind of closes the distances between people. One of the shows we did last year
was actually for an Iranian artist named Ash Koosha who was banned from coming to
the U.S. due to Trump's travel ban. And we actually let him perform his show for
the first time to a U.S. audience that was exposed to this totally different type
of art and both musical and visual. Wow, that's really cool. Yeah so we think it can close borders and
that's what's really exciting. The building that we're about to go in was
actually a bomb site. It had tons of like old furniture and old paintings and
rats and hay. It was mainly a hay barn. Whoa wait! I was not expecting this.
So TheWaveVR has actually shot you in this space before. Yes this is where we
had my 40th birthday bash. There was a middle kind of space divided
here where you know all the cameras were and the VR guys had WaveVR had their
camera here, they had a camera up there they had cameras everywhere, and they
were taking data feeds from my gloves, from my keyboard. And obviously they've
got the audio and all the other kind of however else they depth detect. TheWaveVR
team used the data from Imogen's performance and also recorded her in
front of a green screen to create what they call a hologram in
VR. This data allows the VR to manipulate Imogen's image and add visuals to the
performance you can't get in real life. While she's singing she might break into
a million pixels or dissolve into orbs of light.
Walk me through all the different types of files and things that you have to put
together in order to make this image and hologram happen. Sure yeah we went to
Imogen's house in December and recorded a terabyte of data which is on this drive
here so that includes depth videos which is what this is, which is 3D so instead
of color, it has a distance for each pixel. So you can actually get 3D
information out of like a Kinect and then sync that up with an actual video
camera and overlay a texture on top of the 3D which is how we pull off the
hologram effect. So once you have the depth information where do you go from
there? So we run all of these depth frames and color frames through the
depth kit software and we get this sort of double video where the left side is
color video and the right side of the rainbow represents the distance from the
camera for each pixel. So we can take this information and put it straight
into unity to create a 3D hologram effect.
Are there any firsts either for your company or to your knowledge with VR in
general with this particular Imogen Heap project. Yeah I mean I I know it's
the first show of kind of the VR social experience to host a
three-dimensional hologram. That's one of the things that we were trying to
pioneer in the show and you know one day we imagine being able to do this live.
This hologram is then placed in Imogen's home which TheWaveVR recreated in
virtual reality. The end result is that fans can put on a headset and attend an
intimate concert in Imogen's own living room. As much as I love the idea of space
travel and you know these magical worlds, there's something about the real world
that we shouldn't forget. And what can we bring into that space for
that to be magical and one of the spaces in my life which is so dear
to me is this house and it is a truly magical
beast. So this idea that the venue that the fans experience the VR concert in is
my home. So they're actually on as if there were no walls and you've just got
the height of the building. So taking out all the ceilings, so you just have
the shell of the house. So I was like "could we have just the floorboards
as if they were really the floorboards and can we have paint on
the walls and just make it it like a home?" Because within that you know just
simply breaking apart the walls it's just amazing enough. I think when you're
in that space you feel quite calm and relaxed but you know that you have
superpowers. So I don't think you need to wow people. I think that can happen in
the VR space where you just get bombarded by all this new stuff for
hitting your senses all the time it's actually quite exhausting and a
bit like shouty. So I think I'm really enjoying how to bring everything really
close. Do you think VR will become an integral component to how we experience
music in the future? Yeah I think VR, and AR, and God knows what else R.
Maybe what it might do is it at the moment I feel music has become more of a kind of
background you know. Thing goes on most of the time, it's in the clubs, it's
talking, it's not really experienced. Very few people sit down and
listen to music because it's so on tap. Also as a musician we have like lots
of different stems, lots different versions of songs. I like the idea that
you could explore an earlier version of a song by peeling back an old bit of
wallpaper or something or you know you might be able to take an apple from a
tree and walk into somebody else's VR space and that apple might be the drum
pattern of this song that you could kind of walk into another room and
that were to suddenly turn that song by Pharrell into like rubbish Imogen Heap
drum pattern compared to his pattern. But how would that affect that
or drag you know some string arrangements from of a Bjork song into
whatever else you know. I just like that idea that in time it could become that
kind of flow.
This video was presented by Aloft, different by design.
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