Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Inside Imogen Heap’s cutting-edge VR concert | The Future of Music with Dani Deahl”.
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..
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