Bring the Stadium Home-Live Sports, Music in VR
Exploring VR in relation to the sphere of live events broadcasting, asking questions about the challenges and realities of the same and making wild predictions about the future, whilst getting generally over excited and wandering off into the fringes of my imagination.
Earlier this year I was given the exciting opportunity of chairing a panel at Immersion Festival– India’s first VR film festival and conference. The subject for discussion was ‘Bring the Stadium Home-Live Sports, Music in VR.’
The subject title alone raises a lot of questions. While it’s an exciting prospect, the big fat elephant in the room is the low number of consumer VR headsets out there in India, and indeed the rest of the world. Are there large enough (captive) audiences to make the investment worth it? How do we reach them?
When you consider further that individual sports events (yes even cricket)and artist performances (yes even Bollywood) are somewhat niche in terms of fanbase, this means narrowing down potential audiences further, making the challenge ever-more daunting.
Then there is the actual experience to consider in terms of social and psycho-physiological terms. I’m sure I’m not alone in wanting to experience the bass kick vibrating my insides, the dreamy reverb of a massive arena and the fun of shouting ‘encore’ at the band and singing along with my friends as part of a larger hot and sweaty crowd. I’m sure sports fans will feel the same about whatever it is that gives them goosebumps at live games and you will want the referee to be able to actually hear when you shout insults at him. In these cases, the additional challenge is how to reproduce those very physical sensations and interactions and the resulting emotional experiences they trigger (without triggering the motion sickness-type feeling common to spending too much time in VR — another challenge and a whole other discussion!)
The experience needs to be immersive, yet not isolating. With VR I, like many others, expect more than just the 360-degree equivalent of passively watching a live video broadcast on TV (or your favourite OTT platform). For the broadcasters the experience needs to drive engagement as well as revenue. It needs to be innovative and yet scalable and accessible. It’s a tough egg to crack.
However, fear not, VR visionaries- it’s certainly not all doom and gloom! Let’s not quit before the magic has begun.
Let’s start on sourcing our audiences: The biggest consumers of home VR set-ups are of course gamers. If we look at the recent Marshmello EDM concert attended by an audience of 10 million, all staged within the (2D) game-come-cultural phenomena Fortnite, we can see in-game events that target loyal followers could be one way forward.
In addition, all the social VR platforms like VRchat, AltspaceVR, vTime and even the fairly disappointing Facebook Spaces are worth mentioning at this stage. While the latter two are more about small group engagement, the other two, arguably more popular platforms are already hosting concerts, stand up, yoga classes and other weird and wonderful events.
However, the numbers are still small — concurrent users on VRchat at the time of writing were just under 7000 and AltspaceVR concerts feel like a sparsely attended gig in a psychedelic version of the backroom of your local pub. On the bright side, Oculus has started the promising Venues and then there are other platforms like NextVR and of course fellow panel member Miheer Walavalkar’s Livelike, with all of the above broadcasting events or providing the back end for the same for many types of content, from live concerts and sports to comedy. Then there are OTT platforms like Hotstar already giving us 180/360 streams of live sports and pushing the boundaries with things like live gaming and social feeds and in-house developed VR cricket gaming used as a feature within TV content broadcast on Star Sports. OTT has the big advantage of an enormous captive viewership/subscription base on mobile. I’m really excited to see where all these platforms take us and many of them are certainly already starting to address the social interaction aspect of events as well as audience sourcing.
Another way to connect with audiences is with permanent and temporary public VR set-ups. We are yet to see a sizeable LBVR set-up in India, but we do have other smaller places -Smaaash, PVR cinema’s VR lounges etc., which all have the potential to host events with their existing set-ups. I’m of the age where I remember having to go to a café to use the internet and the huge popularity, bordering at times on cult of net cafés — maybe VR cafés will become ‘a thing’ and event stream evenings ‘a thing at the thing’? Maybe not, or maybe only for limited numbers of hipsters, but then there is still the option of creating temporary set-ups, where large numbers of people can come and access events virtually, all on hired equipment. When we look at the success of live-streamed to satellite-arenas events like Unite with Tomorrowland, the doors are most certainly open to throw VR into the mix if we can get over the hardware availability and cost hurdles.
Moving on to our second point — the physical and resulting psychological/emotional experience necessary for authenticity. Haptics of course are advancing ever forwards and the reality of a ‘Ready Player One-style haptic suit’ is fast moving out of fiction into fact, as are ultrasonics driven mid-air haptics.
In LBVR venues we have the potential to install spatial sound and stomach-wobbling sub-bass along with other ‘4D’ effects- heat, cold, mist, wind etc. Heck, in these spaces we can even look at modelling and reproducing not just the acoustic qualities of live venues, but crazy awesome stuff like the awe-inducing infrasound (>20Hz) resonances of large space arenas and really playing with people’s psyche. The point to note is the science and solutions are there, they exist, but in so far as I’ve seen no one is asking the question ‘what in event streaming VR do we want/need to simulate other than visual and social experiences?’ It will have to be addressed sooner or later if we want to move beyond gimmick into tangible, authentic experience.
However, with haptics, as is the case with the cost of even the most basic VR hardware, we meet once more our second elephant in the room — paise. Yet, history teaches us that costs do go down, and systems miniaturise, so don’t lose heart dear readers. Think of 5.1 and how it moved out of cinemas into our living rooms. You just might have to wait a very long time before we see high level haptics hit the mainstream.
Moving back to the subject of authenticity, social interaction and related personal movement within a physical space can be worked on a great deal also. If you want to attend certain types of event that aren’t seated, you want to move around right? When you move around you want it to feel natural, not just teleporting between fixed camera positions. Also, you want to speak to people, and not necessarily just other people in VR — what about the real, live people at the real live event? I’ve already seen telepresence robots used at music festivals, be it as a publicity stunt (and again, a rather expensive one) but the power to do this is out there! Why do we need to stop at stuff with wheels — can we get wings (propellers) and fly remote crowd-safe drones which can become our ears, eyes and mouths? What about using light-field technology along with AI to reconstruct 3D objects in angles not covered by cameras, in real time, with the mega amount of data processing powered by quantum computers, all connected to direct brain-computer interfaces, allowing us to move around a real space freely and communicate seemingly telepathically with those within it who are also wearing mobile BCIs, individually identified using facial recognition?
Before I let my imagination run away too far and propel myself further into an arguably impractical sci-fantasy filled future with questionable ethical issues, I will move onto my final point. We have the advent of 5G and internet connected everything soon becoming a reality. Innovations like Magic Leap’s utopian vision of the Magicverse are at the infancy of actually beginning to be built and a decentralised AR cloud is only a matter of time. We are nearing a situation where it may be less ‘bringing the stadium home’ and more ‘adding another dimension of reality to the stadium’.
We have already seen commercially successful hologram tours, Eminem using AR in his live performances and a 5G Magic Leap powered MR fashion show at the most recent London Fashion week. It all leads me to believe that event venues are prime locations to become amongst the first in a new wave of augmented reality spaces, with technology enabling permanent infrastructure and accessible equipment to boot. Maybe these very same venues will not only be giving artists the tools and canvas for creatively augmenting performances, but will soon be hosting the very same virtual events mentioned above for crowds en-masse. Just imagine you are sitting in the London Opera house watching a performance which is actually going on in the Sydney Opera house or watching a match in Wembley Stadium UK whilst sitting in the NSCI Mumbai, India. Imagine the experiences are so real the need to travel is eliminated along with the carbon footprint and impact on our increasingly fragile environment?
The future is XR. Anything you can imagine is possible.
