SXSW 2023: Hands-on Amaze VR and Lucas Rizzotto’s Rocket!

My first day at the SXSW exhibition has passed by and I’ve already tried a few interesting things that I would like to describe to you! Discover with me the new concert from Amaze VR and the new innovative experience that the genius of Lucas Rizzotto has been able to conceive!

Aespa’s concert on Amaze VR

Do you remember Amaze VR, the company that was able to deliver an interesting VR concert featuring Megan Thee Stallion? Well, they’re back with a new interesting project: the concert of the K-pop girl band Aespa.

A new concert in preview, and a new platform is born

At SXSW the Amaze team was showcasing a preview of the concert with Aespa, featuring just two songs, for a total experience time of 7 minutes. The polishing phase was still in progress and so the experience had no interactions.

While speaking with the people at the booth, I got to know some interesting details about the direction that Amaze is taking. The Megan Thee Stallion project was made in a totally custom way, and to deliver that impressive performance they had to do 2 months of pre-production and 6 of post-production. With Aespa, they managed to optimize the times to 2 weeks of pre and 4 weeks of post-production. The overall costs for the recording have decreased by a 10 factor. These are impressive results, especially because, as you will read, the overall quality has more or less remained the same.

The idea is to keep reducing costs and optimizing the processes until it will be possible for everyone to create and deliver a good-quality concert on Amaze VR. The vision of the company is not the one of making just a few custom concerts every year, but to create a platform where there are hosted both Amaze’s own productions and the productions of other artists that want to have their own cool VR concerts. Basically, the goal is that everyone can create his own concert on Amaze.

It is a vision that makes sense and is similar to the one of many others in the field (us included). The only problem I see is that currently Amaze’s concerts are very high-quality ones, so they require a high budget for everything (artists, recording, 3D graphics, etc…) and unless they decide to lower the quality bar (and I hope not), I think that this type of concerts will be possible to deliver only for entities that have already a minimum budget to invest for them. So let’s say not really for everyone, but for everyone that has some budget. Which is anyway very cool.

Aespa’s concert hands-on

I was given a Quest 2 headset, but not the controllers because there were no interactions available (as I said, this was a preview). The show started, and I could clearly recognize the Amaze VR’s touch: in front of me, there were the girls of the band, singing and dancing, inside a high-definition environment, probably created in Unreal Engine.

The quality of the recording of the girls was stunning. The resolution was very high and they were tri-dimensional. My colleagues who tried this concert without knowing the previous one were all impressed and said that they were like real. Since I’ve tried Megan Thee Stallion’s one, I could spot a slight downgrade. First of all the girls were “less 3D”, it was like the stereoscopy was slightly flatter. Plus the girls had a slight CGI effect on their faces, the resolutions seemed a bit lower, and I could spot some distortions on the actors that were moving in the periphery of my vision. I mean, everything was very cool, but there were some small defects here and there.

The Amaze team told me that there are some things they are still ironing out in the polishing phase. For instance, they are experimenting with different colors and AI lighting to improve on the 3D effect. They told me that this concert is more difficult than Megan’s one because here there are many people moving on the stage, while Megan was only one. As for the resolution, it is actually an 8K capture versus a 16K one… which made a very slight difference. So many of these problems may be solved or at least reduced in the final launch version.

That said, the performance was very cool. If you have ever seen a K-pop band, you know that their dance moves are perfect, and seeing them moving was almost hypnotic. Being so close to them was amazing and entertaining. Also, the environment had some special effects happening in specific moments of the song: colored smokes, moving lasers, firefights, etc… The whole choreography was entertaining and made sure that the performance was never boring, even if there were no interactions. I’m not joking when I say that I could have stayed there for at least other two songs without any problem. If I have to look for something to criticize on this side, too… it is probably that I didn’t get while there was a big green eye (the “Sauron’s eye” like my friend and art director Lapo called it) behind the singers… probably I would have chosen something else. But this is just a comment that comes from my personal tastes.

In general, I found the experience very well-done and entertaining. I hope that for the final version, which should be released this summer, the team can polish all the current imperfections, plus add a few interactions that make the experience more engaging and more active.

By the way, I have also to say that the people at the Amaze VR’s booth were all very nice, so I wish them a lot of good luck.

Lucas Rizzotto’s Rocket

We all know Lucas Rizzotto and how cool he is. Well, he’s back with a new VR piece of content, and of course, it is original and fun like all the others he has made.

Pillow

When I arrived at his installation, I saw a lot of beds, and people lying on them with a VR headset on. The stewards of the booth were all wearing pajamas. My first reaction was WHAT THE FUUUUU…

Lucas explained to me that he wants to create this ecosystem called Pillow, with many applications in mixed reality, all to be enjoyed while lying down. I found this idea very innovative, because if we exclude 360 movies, many experiences are usually meant to be enjoyed seated or standing. Exploring the lying-down scenario is very new. Lucas told me also some ideas he had for the future, like making some of these experiences multidevice, but I won’t tell much not to spoil his strategy.

People at the booth could try a preview of Rocket, the first experience of the Pillow ecosystem.

Rocket

In Rocket, you are a small rocket (you don’t say) whose mission is to bring life to dead planets. You control the experience with just one controller with which you aim at the dead planets you have in front of you and you press the trigger to “shoot” the rocket on the planets so that he can bring life to them. In the beginning, all of this is very easy, but then some difficulties arise: for instance, you can’t aim at the planets directly, but you have to shoot at black holes that deviate the bullets’ trajectory.

The game is divided into mini-levels, which are all very short and never too difficult. I would say that playing them has been quite relaxing. The more you advance in the levels, the more they become complex to solve, thoug. Also during the levels, the story unfolds and you start understanding who is the rocket, why you are on a bed, and so on. Being a Lucas Rizzotto’s experience, it is of course full of jokes and crazy moments, and I would really love to tell you a few of them, but I don’t want to spoil the surprise in case you try it. I’ll just say the experience is very chill, cute, and fun, and it is ideal to be played in a bed.

The experience looked totally VR to me, with the graphical element having a very cute style. Then when I moved my head to look around, I saw that the AR passthrough was active and that all the elements I saw were inside a huge “VR portal” in front of me. So the whole experience was already in mixed reality, something that I found quite cool.

At the end of the day, it won’t surprise you to discover that I loved this experience. Lucas never ceases to amaze me.

The weird moment

Since I love telling you fun stories, here is the weirdest thing that happened to me yesterday. I was trying a VR experience (I won’t tell you the name to not hurt the creators) and at a certain point, there was a meditation moment. I could smell some incense, so I asked the guy “Hey, is there scent emission in this experience?” and he looked at me and said, “I have no idea”. I was quite puzzled about how it is possible that someone that is demoing an experience has no idea of what he is demoing… so I thought that something was lost in translation. I so added some context: “You know, here, it is like I can smell some incense… I don’t know if there is something in the surroundings, like an emitter gadget, or it is just an impression of mine” and he answered me “Maybe it’s the audio” and pointed at the headphones.

This led me to the following conclusions:

1. The headphones had incense scent emission
2. The headphones were made of incense
3. The guy himself was made of incense
4. The creator of the experience has made a Nobel-prize creation that converts audio waves into scents. Next work: conversion of audio waves to weed, booze, and cocaine
5. The audio of the experience was so good that it made my brain imagine the smell of incense. I can’t wait for porn made with the same audio technology
6. The cake is a lie, and so is the incense
7. Even the guy did not exist, he was just an illusion created by the audio technology himself. Maybe all the SXSW is just an audio illusion. We are reaching Inception-levels I did not even think were possible
8. The guy had literally no idea what we were talking about and just said some random answer

I’m still unsure which one is the right answer. Please comment on this post or on my social media channel telling which one for you is the truth. Of course, provided that you exist and are not a product of the audio technology yourself.