AmazeVR Concerts review: Zara Larsson’s performance is a nice one to watch

AmazeVR has just released its new app called “Amaze Concerts” on Meta Quest 2 (App Lab) and SteamVR. Since I have been following the work of this cool Korean company for a while, I tried it as soon as I could, because I wanted to get to know better this new project.

AmazeVR Concerts

I’ve already dedicated a few posts to AmazeVR, starting from its early origins, to the new concert with Megan Thee Stallion, not to mention the prototype of their concerts with Aespa. So I’m not writing another introduction about them… I think you can already find enough material on this website. In case you missed all my previous articles and you are too lazy to read them, the “long story short” you should know is that Amaze VR is dedicated to the production and sale of high-quality VR concerts.

They are not CGI concerts (a la Ariana Grande on Fortnite), or pure 180-360 videos (like the concerts that Meta was used to do inside Oculus Venues), but something in the middle: 180 degrees 3DOF experiences that mix a stereo recording of the singers together with CGI elements. The quality the team puts in its productions is very high, and when I tried Megan Thee Stallion’s concert, I was literally astonished by the stereo capture of the singer, which really looked like in real life.

After that early test, AmazeVR went silent for a while, and now it launched a new app on the Meta Quest (App Lab) Store and SteamVR, called “AmazeVR Concerts”. The difference with the app featuring Megan Thee Stallion is that this new application is meant to host not only one single concert but all the concerts that Amaze is working on. This is the final app that the team plan to use to sell all its performances: or better, we can say, it is a new platform that AmazeVR is building. And the first performance just made available has been the one by “Zara Larsson”, a famous singer (when I heard her name I was like “whooo???” but then I heard one of her songs and I understood that actually, I knew her).

Hands-on AmazeVR Concerts

The download of the application took me a bit of time, since it was more than 1GB. When I opened it, a small tutorial started, which taught me how to grab some hexagonal “crystals” with an artist or a song inside, and put them in a dedicated hole to start either a full concert (in case an artist is represented) or just a single song (in case it is a crystal for a song). The tutorial made me use this mechanism to select at first “Zara Larsson” and then “Symphony” (one of her most famous songs). After this selection, the free sample of the concert started, and this caught me by surprise because I wasn’t expecting this to happen. I mean, for me a tutorial is a tutorial… it’s not meant to actually start the experience.

Anyway, after I enjoyed the free song (let me tell you about that later), the application showed that “the tutorial ended”… which technically was true, but together with the tutorial, also the demo was finished at that point, so I was a bit confused 😐 . I found myself in the main menu environment, where I could have a look at the other performances available. As of today, I could only play Zara Larsson, Megan Thee Stallion, and Ceraadi. But there were many other experiences in “coming soon”, like the one by Aespa that I tried at SXSW. It’s good to see that AmazeVR has a very good launch lineup and will be able to entertain its users for many weeks in the future.

I could select whatever singer by using its “diamond” and at that point see a portal opening, with her (or him) appearing in front of me. The quality of this representation of the singer was great and very realistic: it seemed to me to have Lara Larsson (sorry, Zara… but Lara sounds better IMHO) being there in front of me waiting for me just to launch the performance. For the available singers, I could play for free one song, and then evaluate to buy the full performance as IAP. The Zara Larsson experience was around €7 to have the right to watch the concert for one year. I’ve found this “one-year duration” a pretty weird choice because I expected to buy the concert either as permanent content in my library or as a one-shot ticket, but I thought that maybe this timed duration is given by some agreement on the music rights that AmazeVR had to do with the music labels.

There is also the possibility to press the “App Menu” button on the left Quest controller to see a standard 2D app menu that lets you configure a few settings and read a help section with some FAQ. The setting that I’ve found the most interesting in this menu is the one to make the home menu appear in Mixed Reality. Since I was trying this experience on my Quest Pro, I immediately activated it, but honestly speaking, I saw no particular advantage of seeing the initial menu of the experience in passthrough AR. Since there was no connection between the menu and my space, the real world was adding nothing to it. The only nice thing was seeing Zara Larsson staying there in my room, which was pretty cool… but since the app is mostly 3DOF, I couldn’t move and go close to her, making this illusion a bit worthless. I hope that AmazeVR people can enhance the MR mode in the future and give it more useful features.

The menu also features some glass hexagons around the user that emit sounds when they are touched. I haven’t found any use for them, apart from just playing some notes when interacted.

After having analyzed the menu, I just started playing with the available experiences.

Ceraadi’s concert – hands-on

Ceraadi is probably one of the first artists recorded by AmazeVR. I remember reading some articles about it years ago, and a quick Google search brought me to 2020.

It has been nice from the AmazeVR team to put this recorded performance for free in the application: thanks to it there are 3 free songs to watch in the app (Ceraadi, Zara Larsson, Megan Thee Stallion), which is not bad at all. Ceraadi’s section anyway just features one free song (BFF) and nothing more.

I’ve watched it and I could clearly see how this experience was rougher than the other two: the capture of the singers seems a bit less refined, the stage and stage effects are quite simple, and the “language” of the performance seems still a mix of the real one and the VR one. There is still a big screen behind the singers, like in a real concert, and most of the effects are conveyed in 2D on the screen, like it could happen in a real concert, and not in 3D virtual reality. It seemed to me that here the AmazeVR team was still learning how to properly do concerts in VR. What you basically see is two girls dancing and singing in front of you on a virtual stage, with a screen behind showing some cool visuals, sometimes mentioning the lyrics.

This is not the best experience you will find in the AmazeVR app, but the performance is nice, and it’s free, so I advise you to give it a look anyway.

Zara Larsson’s concert – hands-on

Let’s come now to the star of the show: Zara Larsson. The full experience features 5 of her songs, and one, Symphony, is given for free.

The recording

Zara’s concert is very “AmazeVR”. If you have already watched a performance from this Korean company, you will recognize that this experience follows a similar schema to the previous ones. It is in 180 VR, so you can’t be distracted by looking back. In front of you, there is the singer, with eventually some dancers, which perform just for you.

The singer and the dancers are recorded with a special 180° stereo camera and then have undergone heavy postprocessing so they appear with you as if they were real. You see them as being really in front of you, performing for you. It’s a bit like being on the first row (or even better, on the stage) of a real concert.

Anyway, I have to say that in this version, I saw Zara and the dancers slightly more blurred and flatter (less 3D depth) than Megan Thee Stallion in her performance. I was sure that I felt Megan’s performance was much more realistic, and I have so returned back to watch it again to be sure that there has been really a downgrade and was not only an impression. Watching the two experiences one close to the other confirmed my impression: Zara Larsson’s reconstruction looks amazing, but Megan Thee Stallion, WOW, it’s really fucking real. The resolution of the recording and the stereo effect make the trap singer incredibly realistic, she is one of the best illusions of a human I ever had in XR. With Zara I did not have the same effect: her recording was very well made, but she looked a bit more like… “a recording”. The resolution was a bit lower, and the 3D effect was a bit flatter. Also, she looked slightly CGI because of post-production, but this was probably a positive feature, because this way she merged better with the CGI scene.

When I watched the performance by Aespa at AmazeVR’s booth at SXSW, the team told me that the reason for this effect of less realism is that the company is working on making the performances easier and less expensive to shoot, and this of course brings with it some compromises. And while as a tech guy, I would like to have always top quality for everything, as an entrepreneur I understand that cost reduction may be necessary to make the business sustainable.

Being the capture made with a stereo camera and not a volumetric camera, the full performance is in 3DOF, meaning that you can rotate your head, but you can’t move in the virtual space. This is a bit of an immersion-killer feature of AmazeVR Concerts: you are there, in a magical space together with some artists making a hypnotic dance, but you can not go dancing with them, you can’t even just move around, because you are locked in place. So you can just stay there, sit down, and enjoy the show. This is a bit of a problem, because when you are enjoying music, you should dance, scream, move, or even just move the head following tempo, but with this application, you can not.

I can understand the choice, though: now virtual reality is all a matter of making compromises, so if you want a super-high-quality stereo visualization of the singers, the only way is by doing a stereoscopic video, and this means that if you have to compromise interactions. I guess Amaze just made its decision: if it had privileged interactions, maybe now I would be here criticizing that the capture was not amazing 🙂

The scenes instead are totally made with CGI, and most of them are encoded in a video, too, while some elements are rendered in real time. The scenes are very polished, too, and in this performance are mostly fantasy-like. I would bet they are made in something like Unreal Engine, and their quality is really good: I would say that they had an inverse evolution with regard to the singers: the ones in this performance are much more refined and detailed than the ones in the previous concert. I also liked how the environment reacted to the music by flashing lights and activating graphical FXs.

For this concert, I counted something like 2 environments, and all the songs are separated by the classical fade-in-fade-out. There is no interest in creating a bridge between the experiences as the previous concert did. I preferred the previous approach of giving a cohesive sense to the whole experience, but at the end of the day, it’s much easier and more effective to convey the transition this way.

Interactions

When I reviewed the previous concert, I criticized it because it had little interaction, and what worries me is that this concert had even less :|. The sense of haptics, which I enjoyed in the previous show, is rarely exploited in Zara’s performance (with the exception of some vibrations when I am supposed to clap my hands) and the only interactions I could do were:

• Moving my hands to leave a colored trail behind them. This was nice for the first few seconds, but then since there was no one there with me (the experience is single-player), I found this interaction a bit limited. Being the serious person I am, I also spent some time trying to draw flying dicks using it
• In two songs, I could click the controllers’ trigger buttons to activate some special FX: in the free Symphony track, I could for instance throw some rose petals in the air. And this was again nice, but since nothing in the environment reacted to it and I was alone in the room, it didn’t add much to the experience.

Considering that the concert is already static and single-player, I would have preferred to have at least something more interactive to play with in the experience. Instead, the only thing you can do is stay there and watch the performance. Which is nice, but… in the long run may feel not enough.

Performance

The performance seemed to follow a similar pattern for every song. It was either just her singing and dancing alone trying to be a bit sexy, or her singing and dancing together with other four female dancers. The second type of performance was better because of course, five people can create quite an interesting choreography.

There were sometimes some effects that were triggered in the environment following the rhythm of the music, and those were cool to see: lasers, flames, flashing lights, you name it. They made the experience feel much more alive. And another cool and unexpected thing to see was the changes in lighting: sometimes the environment got darker and the performers got darker, too. This was cool because it was clearly an effect that has been done in post-production to the singer’s recording and is also quite rare to see that in other VR concerts. I loved that.

I think that the performance with the best FXs is exactly the free one, that is Symphony. I would say that for my taste, the other performances are a bit less rich in FX and coordination. Especially the problem is that after I watched the free demo, which was nice, I expected more variation from the other songs, while all the performances looked quite similar. I found more variation in Megan Thee Stallion’s experience: the settings were less detailed, but more different the one from the others. Plus I think that Megan was able to keep better the stage with her charisma.

I instead found it interesting that Zara acknowledged my presence by talking with me sometimes and also inviting me to sing and dance with her. It was also nice to see the singer looking at me and try to involve me more in the experience. This part has been done very well by the AmazeVR team, and increased my sense of presence.

Comfort

The experience is a seated one, but still, there are two sources of a bit of discomfort.

The first one is the camera movements. Being the experience 3DOF and static, the AmazeVR team tried to give it a bit of motion by making the camera slowly move in the space in all three directions. This made the concert feel less static, but at the same time, it can cause motion sickness. Camera movements are always slow, but in sensitive people, they can cause adverse effects.

The second reason for discomfort was personal space. There are a few moments in the experience when Zara got a bit too much close to me and this felt to me like a violation of my personal space. In a particular moment during Symphony, I remember having her coming a bit too close to me, and I tried instinctively to go back with my head, but being the experience 3DOF, I couldn’t “escape” and I was forced to have her head close to mine, which gave me a negative sensation. This made me think: Zara is a beautiful woman and of course, as a man, I would be happy to have her close to me in the real world, but in that context, it didn’t feel right, probably because there was no explicit or implicit “consent” to have her close to me, I was just forced to, and that gave me discomfort.

Apart from these two details, the experience is comfortable.

Misc

The experience doesn’t allow recording of the concert: if you try to record while in the app, the recording ends immediately, I guess to protect it from people recording the whole experience and then putting it for free online for everyone. But since nothing can stop the Ghost, I’ve managed to record it anyway… and you can see that from the GIFs in the article 🙂 . To be kind to the AmazeVR team, anyway, I’m just publishing shots from the free song.

Another special thing that got my attention is that when I started the experience, the Quest runtime asked me if I wanted to use Shared Spatial Anchors. I found it puzzling because AmazeVR concerts are meant to be single-players, but then I remembered that actually, the company is working to make local multiplayer experiences so that multiple people in the same theater could enjoy the show together. I think having some multiplayer components would be great to make the experience feel more alive and more entertaining, so I hope to know more about it.

Price considerations

The AmazeVR Concerts app is free on App Lab, but the Zara Larsson concert is around 7€. The experience is nice, but it is also very short (around 16 minutes, which literally fly away in a snap of a finger), and with little replayability value (unless you are a huge fan of Zara Larsson). Personally, I would have preferred to pay it a bit less, around 3-5€. I could go to 7€ if there was multiplayer and/or more interactions or more value in having replays.

Regarding the “one year pass”, I don’t think I will play it again in the next year: it is probable, though, I will show it to someone else when I want to showcase my Quest to friends. So I still find some value in having this time duration.

Final impressions

I’m happy that my friends at AmazeVR have created a new app where people can buy and enjoy all the amazing creations they are working on. And the first experience they are showcasing there, the one with Zara Larsson, is the third AmazeVR production that I watch, and it confirmed to me how the AmazeVR team is very good at producing great VR concerts. I found it very well shot, with the artist and the dancers feeling quite realistic, and the CGI environments beautiful and with nice animations going at the rhythm of the music. It was also enjoyable: as I’ve said, 15 minutes are literally fled.

But I think there is still some work to do to improve these shows. The main criticisms I highlighted in the previous review still hold true and the concert feels a bit static and monotonous: I don’t think that a concert should be watched alone by staying sit on a chair. I really hope that more interactions, haptics, and also multiplayer components will be added in the next concerts. Plus… I know that I’m biased from watching the previous performance, but… the level of the capture of Megan Thee Stallion… I would really love to see that again. Once I saw that level, it’s difficult for me to settle back to something that is less than that.

As someone that makes concerts in VR, I know how hard it is and how we are all making compromises, so I understand AmazeVR’s decision of prioritizing some things over others. For instance, Megan Thee Stallion’s performance was astonishing, but also very expensive to produce. As I’ve written in my previous article from SXSW: “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.” As a company, if I can reduce the costs by a 10x factor and have just a slightly worse result, well, I just do it. So, as I’ve said, I understand their decisions.

In general, I think it was a positive experience for me, and I suggest you give it a try for free by accessing it App Lab or SteamVR. Of course, after you do that, let me know what you think about it!