Gadgetory

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 by 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 the way vr so welcome today the underground of West yeah it's so cozy it's nice it doesn't feel like you're normal in contact anything 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 me Moo gloves and my Celia a blockchain project for musicians now she's tackling virtual reality you know keyboards I don't really use that much anymore dad is cool Bundoran working [Laughter] 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 it was when I I had my first proper immersive VR experience thanks to wave VR and Adam Arrigo from wave er 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 it is quite normal but this is 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 components 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 the wave VR 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 it's 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 and it's also how does that change in VR yeah I'm one of the cool things about the wave 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 Cuccia 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 u.s. audience he was exposed to this totally different type of art and both Musical and visual Wow so you 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 we it had tons of like old furniture and old paintings and rats and hay she was mainly a hay bond whoa wait I was not expecting for this so the way VR 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 wavy all had their camera here they had a camera up there they had cameras everywhere and they were taking data feeds from my gloves my keyboard and taking obviously they've got the audio and all the other kind of however else they depth detects the way VR team used the data from images 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 imagens 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 imagens 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 in either for your company or to your knowledge with VR in general with this particular image and hate project yeah I mean I I know it's the first show I like kind of a VR social experience to host a you know a three-dimensional hologram that's one of the things that 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 imagens home which the way VR recreated in virtual reality the end result is that fans can put on a headset and attend an intimate concert in imagens 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 and we shouldn't forget and that what can we bring into that space for that to be you know 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 they've just got me 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 just so that you can as if they were really the floorboards and can we have paint on the nerves 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 think you don't 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 you know 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 we are an AR and God knows whales are 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 from in clubs it's talking it's like it's not really experienced very few people sit down and listen to music because it's 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 visit em but you know how would that affect that and or drag you know some string arrangements from of your soul into whatever else you know I just like that idea that in time that could become that kind of flow this video was presented by loft different by design if you enjoyed this please subscribe to our YouTube channel