 Seeing your favorite artist in person is one of the best feelings in the world. As a performer myself, I love the energy of DJing to a packed house. What if that feeling could be replicated in virtual reality? Watching a concert in VR is not a new concept. Many artists have done 360 videos of their shows. But Imogen Heap is taking it one step further by creating a hologram-like version of herself in VR. Imogen has always been at the forefront of emerging music technology, and her new project is no different. We're here in the UK to learn about an immersive VR experience she's created with The Wave VR. So, welcome to the underground of my studio. It's so cozy. It's nice. It doesn't feel like your normal contact-anything studio. Imogen Heap is a Grammy Award-winning musical artist, producer, and audio engineer. Known for her boundary-pushing electronic music, both as a solo artist and in groups like FruFru. Her interest in technology has led to projects such as her gesture-controlled Mimu Gloves and Mycelia, a blockchain project for musicians. Now she's tackling virtual reality. These are bits of keyboards that, to be honest, I don't really use that much anymore. I do actually use this quite a lot. That is cool. Thunder and lightning. So why did you want to create a VR experience? Well, it was always on the cards eventually in my life. I suppose for me when it really clicked was when I had my first proper immersive VR experience thanks to Wave VR. And Adam Arrigo from Wave VR was doing a demo. But actually for me the real magic came when I was interacting with Adam in the space. And I realised that I felt so much closer and more connected that it wasn't this kind of distant, magical space. It was this real, like, human interaction. There was a sense of, oh, actually, this is quite normal. There's something every day about this. There's something that I could bring into my music life with this. Experiencing music in VR has been around for a while. But unlike other companies, the Wave VR features a social component and designs custom environments where users can interact with each other while at the same show. They've also created these social virtual reality experiences for artists such as Tokimonsta, The Glitch Mob and Kill the Noise. I went to talk to Adam at the Wave VR to learn more. So why do you think VR is the future of music? You know, our central mission is about kind of harnessing the power of VR technology and leveraging it to create a visual experience, an interactive experience, a social experience that you just couldn't have at a real show. We think that the future of music is probably something that combines all of those elements. It's not just about how music gets performed or distributed in a new way, but how people socialize around it, how it's visualized. And you mentioned something about the social aspect of it. And I think that's really interesting because I think people find going to a concert to be a very social experience in and of itself. So how does that change in VR? Yeah. One of the cool things about The Wave, we just launched internationally, and when you go in there for these shows, you actually meet people from around the world. One of the cool things about social VR is that it kind of closes the distances between people. One of the shows we did last year was actually for an Iranian artist named Ash Koushia, who was banned from coming to the U.S. due to Trump's travel ban. And we actually let him perform his show for the first time to a U.S. audience who was exposed to this totally different type of art, both musical and visual. Wow. So yeah, we think it can close borders, and that's what's really exciting. The building that we're about to go in was actually a bomb site. It had tons of old furniture and old paintings and rats and hay. It was actually mainly a hay barn. Whoa, wait, I was not expecting this. So The Wave VR has actually shot you in this space before? Yes. This is where we had my 40th birthday bash. There was a middle kind of space divided here where all the cameras were, and the VR guys had, The Wave VR had their camera up here, they had a camera up there, they had cameras everywhere. And they were taking data feeds from my gloves, from my keyboard, obviously they got the audio, and all the other kind of however else they depth detect. The Wave VR team used the data from Imogen's performance and also recorded her in front of a green screen to create what they call a hologram in VR. This data allows the VR to manipulate Imogen's image and add visuals to the performance you can't get in real life. While she's singing, she might break into a million pixels or dissolve into orbs of light. Walk me through all the different types of files and things that you have to put together in order to make this Imogen hologram happen. Sure, yeah. We went to Imogen's house in December and recorded a terabyte of data which is on this drive here, so that includes depth videos, which is what this is, which is 3D. What's a depth video? So instead of color, it has a distance for each pixel, so you can actually get 3D information out of like a Kinect and then sync that up with an actual video camera and overlay a texture on top of the 3D, which is how we pull off the hologram effect. So then once you have the depth information, where do you go from there? So we run all of these depth frames and color frames through this depth kit software and we get this sort of double video where the left side is color video and the right side, the rainbow, represents the distance from the camera for each pixel. So we can take this information and put it straight into Unity to create a 3D hologram effect. Are there any firsts in either for your company or to your knowledge with VR in general with this particular Imogen Hake project? Yeah, I mean, I know it's the first show, like kind of a VR social experience to host a, you know, a three dimensional hologram. That's one of the things that we were trying to pioneer in the show. You know, one day we imagine being able to do this live. This hologram is then placed in Imogen's home, which the Wave VR recreated in virtual reality. The end result is that fans can put on a headset and attend an intimate concert in Imogen's own living room. As much as I love the idea of space travel and, you know, these magical worlds, there's something about the real world that we shouldn't forget. And what can we bring into that space for that to be, you know, magical? And one of the spaces in my life which is so dear to me is this house, and it is a truly magical beast. So this idea that the venue that the fans experience the VR concert in is my home. So they're actually on as if there were no walls and you've just got the height of the building. So it's taken out all the ceilings. So you just have the shell of the house. So I was like, could we have just the floorboards just so that you could, as if they were really the floorboards. And can we have paint on the walls and just make it look like a home? Because within that, you know, just simply breaking apart the walls is just amazing enough. I think when you're in that space, you feel quite calm and relaxed. But you know that you have superpowers. So I think you don't need to wow people. I think that can happen in the VR space where you just get bombarded by all this new stuff for hitting your senses all the time. It's actually quite exhausting and, you know, a bit like shouty. So I think I'm really enjoying how to bring everything really close. Do you think VR will become an integral component to how we experience music in the future? Yeah, I think we are in AR and God knows what else are. Maybe what it might do is at the moment I feel music has become more of a kind of background, you know, thing goes on most of the time. It's in clubs, it's talking, it's like it's not really experienced. Very few people sit down and listen to music because it's so on tap. Also, as a musician, we have like lots of different stems, lots of different versions of songs. I like the idea that you could explore an earlier version of a song by peeling back an old bit of wallpaper or something. Or, you know, you might be able to take an apple from a tree and walk into somebody else's VR space. And that apple might be the drum pattern of this song that you could kind of walk into another room and that would just suddenly turn that song by Pharrell into like rubbish image and heap drum pattern compared to his pattern. But, you know, how would that affect that? Or drag, you know, some string arrangements from a Bjork song into whatever else, you know. I just like that idea that in time it could become that kind of flow. This video was presented by Aloft, different by design. If you enjoyed this, please subscribe to our YouTube channel.