At the end of 2021, Meta held three metaverse concerts at its VR platform Horizon Venues, which Oculus headset users can experience for free.
The star-studded lineup includes rapper Young Thug, DJ David Guetta and group The Chainsmokers.
Image courtesy of Meta
But the effect is not ideal, Oculus official website information shows that the most followed one is only 18,000 people. The main problem is the poor VR experience.
Judging from the August 2020 beta version, Horizon Venues offers a seat in the middle of a comedy show. The player who incarnates as the "legless monster" seems to plunge into the three-dimensional dimension and then shakes and leaves silently.
Private beta experience. Animated from: YouTube@Graphics Monkey
After more than a year, Horizon Venues has barely optimized the VR experience.
Young Thug. Image credit: Facebook
Young Thug and The Chainsmokers were just concerts with 180° virtual backgrounds; David Guetta directly provided his live 2D video at the Louvre Abu Dhabi.
Of course, players can watch while dancing and avatars, or they can communicate with other fans in the lobby. But on New Year's Eve, that wasn't enough to attract people to a concert alone at home wearing a VR headset.
Looking at China, the Baidu Create Conference in December 2021 unveiled the "Xi'an" metaverse.
Baidu said that the demand for computing power in the metaverse is nearly infinite, based on AI native cloud, spatial sound field reconstruction and other technologies, "Xi'an" took the lead in China to achieve 100,000 people with the same screen interaction and "10,000 concert-level" real sound effect restoration.
However, in addition to face-to-face voice interaction, remote voice communication, body language communication, and punch card photography, there are not many functions currently open, the concert eight characters are not skimmed, the whole can only be regarded as the prototype of the meta-universe, and the virtual body painting style is also slightly weird.
Ma Jie, vice president of Baidu, pointed out that visual, auditory and interactive problems are the three major technical problems hindering the development of the metaverse. It will be a gradual and step-by-step process of improvement.
Taking VR headsets as an example, whether it is the running capacity of VR or the huge computing power required to produce 360-degree simulation effects, it is far less than the PC system on which AAA games rely. A series of core technologies supporting the VR headset are still to be matured, and there is still a long way to go to create a sense of realism like Ready Player One.
In contrast, the Fortnite Travis Scott concert in April 2020 is still repeatedly mentioned. The duration of less than 10 minutes does not affect its peak of virtual concerts.
In front of millions of players and live viewers, an asteroid crashed to the ground, players were shocked by the air currents and flew away, and the huge Travis Scott emerged from the explosion to perform his single "Sicko Mode".
GIF by YouTube@Travis Scott
The entire game scene is accompanied by music, changing into a rich stage effect, staging visual spectacles again and again, fire rain, stars, the seabed, space... Players can move and adjust their perspective freely, following the rhythm of electronic music in weightlessness.
The virtual concert is backed by Fortnite developer Epic, which combines powerful server-side load pressure, Unreal Engine, real-time rendering capabilities, and fine motion capture technology, 3D portrait polishing, and holographic character projection.
Fortnite concerts have been hailed as "a glimpse of the game's metaverse", and players are only faced with computers, XBox devices and 2D screens, which means that the future of virtual concerts must be found in the metaverse.
Image credit: xrtoday
When everyone is the number one player, with VR headsets, somatosensory clothing, cyberprosthetic prosthetics, brain-computer interfaces, low latency, high immersion is just the basic requirements, a virtual concert can be trembling, provided that the technology can get there.
While the concert went unnoticed, Meta's metaverse became the big winner for Christmas 2021, with the Oculus VR app surpassing TikTok to top the Free Downloads list in the App Store, and the Quest 2 headset being the most popular tech gift for Christmas.
Reality is always bone-chilling, and the current metaverse platform is a bit "rough", it is difficult to imagine zuckerberg's "working, studying, and living all day in the VR world", and the real meta-universe concert is still preparing for its prelude.
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