Live events in the Metaverse are now possible thanks to new motion capture animation techniques.
WondAR Studios and LOFT 107, at the Meet Digital Culture Center in Milan, have made available to the public a virtual experience creating a real concert in virtual reality.
What is the boundary between real and augmented reality? Where is the line crossed? And instead of imagining a boundary between the two, what if we defined the development of augmented reality simply as a possibility to explore human imagination and multisensory experiences?
WondAR Studios, a new project for virtual reality concerts
Being able to see, move, but above all interact with a three-dimensional environment, makes the VR virtual reality experience much more interactive, and that is why entertainment contributes to adding value.
Paolo Aralla, founder of the WondAR Studios startup and AIR3 member, has started this new project: to build VR concerts with digital avatar animated in motion capture. Aralla wants to follow the path already opened by music giants like Travis Scott and Justin Bieber, who in the last year have made virtual concerts. The peculiarity of the project is that the animation of the artist takes place entirely in real time without post-production, for this reason we can say that it opens the doors to all Live events.
How realize a Metaverse Live Concert
To realize this kind of experience, WondAR Studios has developed a fully transportable setup that allows you to view Live the full character animation, with a technology that comes directly from the cinema.
Alessio Albanesi, 3D artist, starting from a base of Metahumans, created and modeled the Sewit’s avatar, singer protagonist of the event held at the Meet. For her, he also designed a dress with the perfect fit and managed the dynamics of the dress in real time directly to the engine of Unreal Engine.
Sewit’s avatar moved inside the Metaverse, a virtual space of Unreal Engine with extraterrestrial connotations that changes color to the rhythm of music. Virtual cameras were prepared, with different shots, that moved and followed the character during the performance. The song brought by Sewit, produced at Loft107 by Stefano Breda in art Mastermaind, is basically a mashup between the eternal value of Whitney Houston with "I Will Always Love You" and a more contemporary second part that recalls the current urban scene; a combination that also wants to unite two different generations, which in different ways approach new technologies but that together develop a new sense of art and entertainment.
Come teletrasportarsi nel Metaverso con un visore di realtà virtuale
At the end of the performance, Stefano Girardi, director and VFX artist (also a member of AIR3), made available to the public the possibility to teleport, with the Meta Quest 2 viewer, in the environment in which Sewit’s performance took place and interact with it, for example finding alien creatures and then destroying them.
The idea of the collaboration between WondAR, MEET and AIR3 stems from the common interest to develop new projects and ideas in the field of VR, making available and within everyone’s reach the practical demonstration of how the new entertainment systems are evolving.