SXSW Reviews vol. 2: Hands-on with AmazeVR, Beatday, and The Sick Rose

These days I’m writing you some short reviews about the experiences I have tried at SXSW. This is the second episode of this series, and you can find the first one at this link.

AmazeVR

Working in the VR concert sector, I was very intrigued by the idea of trying AmazeVR. I still remember when Amaze was a distribution platform for 360 videos… I loved the high quality of its videos and I also loved the team working there. Then the startup pivoted to VR concerts when it understood that the market for 360 videos wasn’t going to explode. The idea was to revolutionize VR concerts by creating performances of famous artists in VR so that fans could have a close experience with them. But differently from other companies, the purpose was not having a concert at home, but to go in theaters, or in some dedicated trucks and let many people at the same time enjoy these performances in selected locations. You could enjoy the concert, but with the artist very close to you, something that is usually impossible when you attend a real concert.

At the beginning of this year, AmazeVR got fresh funding of $15M to make its vision come true. The masterplan of the company can be summarized by this excerpt from a TechCrunch article:

AmazeVR is rolling out its first commercial VR concert with 3X Grammy winner Megan Thee Stallion to tour select AMC Theatres across the U.S. this spring. Lee told TechCrunch that the company has already secured its second artist, a global A-list artist, and is finalizing the third artist. Its first VR concert tour springs from years of R&D that resulted in proprietary 9K cameras and software that can automate complex unreal engine-based VR concert visual effects (VFX) modules and run more than 100 headsets at a time. The startup plans to scale its content creation, releasing new VR concerts weekly by 2024 to both in-theater and at-home viewers. 

“You really need to experience our VR concerts to get a full grasp of how impactful they are. VR can finally blow all 2D experience out of the water. Thanks to our technology, we can evoke a real sense of presence you can’t get from a screen, the feeling that your favorite artist is right here, face to face with you

All of this sounds very cool, so as soon as I entered the SXSW VR Experience area and I saw the booth from Amaze VR, I immediately booked it to try it. I had very high expectations, considering everything I had read about it.

When my turn arrived to try the experience, I put the Oculus Quest 2 standalone headset on. The guy serving me warned that it was still a prototype and there may be some problems and things to improve. So ok, I won’t be too harsh on this, I promised myself. He also told me that the experience was divided into two parts: one to showcase interactivity between users during the concert, and another one to showcase the musical performance itself.

The first part started, and a tutorial explained to me what I had to do. Everything worked with Quest hand tracking: there were objects appearing in front of me, and I had to aim at them with my head and then perform a gesture with my hand to trigger the shooting action. So gaze-to-aim and hand-to-shoot. Oh wow… 2015 has called and said that it wants its user experience back. On my right, I could see that there were the avatars of the other players playing the game with me, so the game was supposed to be multiplayer, creating a shared interactive experience that could create real bonds between people. The idea was nice. But a rapid check by putting my headset on and off and looking at my right revealed that the multiplayer interaction was probably just faked for this prototype. And anyway, the game was too simple even in single-player mode that it had little sense in multiplayer. I don’t want to sound harsh, because I’ve been told this was a prototype (and I understand the difference between a prototype and a finished product), but for this part, the idea is the right one, but the implementation is as if it doesn’t exist yet. Creating multiplayer interactions is a good strategy to foster more immersion in the experience, but I think that there is the need of more meaningful interactions and a better user experience.

The second part was about the concert by the 3X GRAMMY WINNER Megan Thee Stallion… a singer I personally haven’t seen before. In this scene I could see her singing and dancing in front of me, quite close, let’s say at 5 meters from me maybe, with four or five dancers around her. She was very realistic, and the quality of the recording was astounding. I thought it was a volumetric video, but according to people at the booth, it was not volumetric, but “just” a high-definition stereo flat recording. The merit of the discovery is of a video director that understood that the quality was too high for current volumetric video technologies. Megan Thee Stallion was visible in every detail, and I could appreciate all the moves of her body and her skin. If not for some kind of wrong shading that made her body as if it was slightly reflective, it would have been really like being in front of her in real life. I was impressed by this.

Around her, there were these four dancers, that were probably a mix between a volumetric video and some CGI stuff, and they were dancing creating choreography with the main artist. They didn’t look realistic like Megan… they were more anonymous and were made so that to look a bit like gaming characters. The stage only featured the artists, and in the background, there was an enormous version of the face of Megan that looked like being made of violet rubber.

The 3X Grammy Winner sang her song in which she repeated for 7529 times the N-word, and for 75% of the time twerked her ass on my face. I think the standards to provide Grammy awards have changed a bit in the last few years. I don’t know what else I could expect from an experience labeled as “THE HOTTIVERSE”.

But at least thanks to the wobbling of her ass cheeks during the twerking, I have been able to appreciate the high quality of the recording. The dancers were dancing in perfect sync with her, so the overall music+dance performance was very enjoyable. During this performance, there were some actions happening: the big face in the background sometimes changed expression, sometimes my point of view slightly moved in position, causing me a bit of motion sickness, and in a few selected moments of the song there were some effects (like confetti, or fireworks) popping up.

Again, it’s a prototype, but I expected something more from a company with Amaze’s reputation: just showing a nice musical performance with dancing is good for a few minutes, but if you want to entertain the public, you have to provide a richer location, much more visual FX, and then more interactions. And I get that this is just an alpha, and that the interactions are represented by the first part of the experience I have tried… but everything sounded to me a bit too alpha for a company that wants to launch the tour of the singer “this spring” (that is basically now) according to TechCrunch. I really hope the employees will crunch working on it to be able to craft an experience that can be interactive, multiplayer, and interesting for a long time. I think the idea is right, and the main ingredient, that is the performance of the singer is right, but all the rest needs an enormous improvement. Good luck to Amaze for it, I hope they will succeed in finalizing their prototype 🙂

Beatday

Beatday is another virtual concert I was able to try at the HTC Vive booth. It’s an experience where multiple people can enjoy a concert together, but the setting is totally different from the one of Amaze VR.

Apart from the hardware (it was a Vive Focus 3 in this case), also all the setting and the graphics were different: in this case, we were in a city, and at the center of the city there was a huge stage with on top of it the volumetric video of an Asian band singing a Chinese song. We could move and fly around the city, and also get close to the band. With some buttons, we could activate some gadgets in our hands to move and have fun.

I see this concert in a prototypical stage, too, like the one of Amaze VR: here the idea was good, but the implementation so-so. The graphics of the city were not polished, and the colors were a bit washed out. The volumetric video of the band was good if seen from far away, but I could fly and go very close to the band and see their polygons like the ones of an old Tomb Raider game (probably something should have prevented me to come this close). The interaction with the controllers was a bit weird, with all the buttons mapped to different actions: one button was to activate a light stick, another one to activate some “guitar guns”, another one toggled the fly mode, which let you fly using the thumbstick. During the demo time, it was difficult to remember what button activated which function, so every time I wanted to do something, I just pressed randomly all the buttons until the correct action showed up. Flying was not that fluid, and the guitar guns were a nice idea, but apart from showing a graphical effect, they didn’t seem to activate a real action, so they were not that useful.

Again, nice idea, but still work-in-progress implementation.

The Sick Rose

The Sick Rose was another experience available at the Vive booth. It was a stop-motion storytelling VR experience that featured the following plot:

Rose had a fight with her mother. Feeling sorry for saying hurtful words, Rose is determined to apologize to her mother who is currently working at the hospital. However, as the pandemic around her escalated, the way to the hospital has become dangerous and difficult. Would Rose, a sick little girl who does not know her way, be able to reunite with her mother?

From a technical standpoint, the experience was quite interesting: the use of stop-motion is quite unusual in VR experiences, and its use made sure The Sick Rose felt very original to me. The graphical style, similar to figures made with modeling clay, was also quite unique in its genre. The production quality in general, for what concerned audio and video, felt pretty good. So I think this movie deserved to be selected from various festivals, like Venice VR Expanded.

But on the enjoyment side, I can’t say I was excited by watching The Sick Rose: first of all, it is a kind of sad story, with an overall unsettling mood. Then, I couldn’t understand completely the logic of it, and I haven’t got if what was happening was a dream, the reality, or what. Some parts really seemed a bit strange put one after the other, so maybe they represented a dream starting or something like that. Especially the happy ending of the story with then a sad final ending sequence puzzled me. I tried asking some explanations to other people that have watched the movie with me, but they felt a bit confused about the plot as well. It is a piece that must be watched with care and needs some external explanations to be totally understood, I think.

And that’s it for this second episode of reviews! I hope you are enjoying them, and if it is the case, please share them with your friends!