Objectives:
This ambitious and creative Accelerator will aim to prototype an end-to-end workflow for immersive live streaming from music festivals, combining multi-perspective video, viewpoint-aware spatial audio, and interactive audience participation.
A series of on-location POCs will be captured to transform festival livestreams into two-way, interactive, shared experiences that immerse fans in the real audience via VR (Virtual Reality) and immersive audio and let the real audience see the virtual fans via AR (Augmented Reality). The project aim is to include high quality, UHD VR viewpoints from the audience and backstage, via steadicam cameras, and the stage via robotic cameras. Virtual fans will also experience full immersive audio captured at the venue combined with the concert main feed to provide a truly enveloping experience.
Fans and artists equipped with AR glasses will be able to see the virtual participants’ avatars in the crowd as if they were there IRL. The backbone objective for this experience will be a live bidirectional feed over broadband infrastructure, allowing both mass audience virtual fans and the event audience to interact in real time, sharing the same moment across physical and virtual environments.
Innovation and Collaboration:
This Accelerator team’s innovation will push the boundaries of live music and fan interaction, and implement an end-to-end UHD XR pipeline workflow that combines a multi-view perspective via 180/360-degree live videos from the live music stage and crowds on site.
The POC exploration will also show viewpoint-aware Immersive Audio that stays tightly synchronised at low latency, plus seamless perspective switching.
This truly global consortium of broadcasters, academia, filmmakers and technical vendors will collaborate together to develop a true, two-way presence so remote and in-venue audiences can see and interact with each other in real time, while the fans on location can experience remote participants as holographic entities in an AR (Augmented Reality)-style presence.
This POC innovation will also aim to result in an end-to-end blueprint for a proven workflow that the music and broadcasting industries can reuse across other events, anywhere in the world.