Music festivals are gearing up for an arms race in VR experiences, and this summer is likely to be an inflection point. But what will that look like?
Sometimes technology and culture smash into one another in surprising ways that no one could have predicted, changing the future by necessity. But much of the time the trend feels so inevitable that you can see it coming from miles away. Nowhere has this pattern been clearer than in virtual reality, where for years there have been assurances the technology is about to initiate the next great paradigm shift in entertainment. And as music festivals have undergone concurrent growth, eating up huge parts of the live music industry in general, the question of VR’s saturation in the festival world has become more of a “when” than an “if.” Music festivals are gearing up for what they see as an inevitable arms race in VR experiences, and this summer is likely to be an inflection point.
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And so I recently found myself walking into LA’s sprawling Hangar Studios for an event that was supposed to demonstrate how virtual reality “will transform the way we experience live music.” I expected to see demo stations and groups of headsetted guests in the awkward postures of people trying out new VR setups as they experienced what it was like to see a music festival from a drone’s 360-degree perspective. I didn’t expect that I’d be walking into a chilly forest scene with actual birch trees reaching up toward the sound stage’s ceiling and actual snow drifting down, alongside a mob of young Californians who seemed legitimately mystified to be suddenly encountering winter.
The experience only got more Narnia-like as I was escorted through an entrance in a wall full of doors and into a cubicle, where an attendant strapped me into a Playstation VR headset. With the headset on, I was left to experience a short immersive animation set to the Chainsmokers’ “Roses,” starring wolves and giants rendered in the psychedelically vivid style that pops up frequently on branded festival merch. When it was over the attendant opened a door in the other side of the cubicle from where I’d entered and let me out into a huge room elaborately decorated to resemble an IRL manifestation of the animation’s summery dreamworld, where the Chainsmokers would perform on what looked like a grassy hill. I was confused. This… didn’t suck?
“It’s inevitably the future,” Chainsmoker Drew Taggart told me backstage, explaining his own skepticism about most music-related VR concepts after offering me a shot of tequila from the duo’s generous green room spread. “We’ve been in music doing this for four or five years now. In that period we’ve seen the beginning of virtual reality in terms of for consumers, and we’ve seen people try to incorporate it into things we use and have it not work. So I feel like we’re about to get to that first… They’re catching on about how to set a VR experience to really get people to understand what it is and what it can be. There’s obviously still a long way to go.”
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Source: Vice Noisey