 We've almost lost money on Epic, it's been more of a passion project, so we just started sketching on doing a live show that would be kind of more future. You want to give people an experience as they walk away and try and blow people's minds, it's always been our kind of agenda. I actually like seeing it from the crowd's perspective, like they upload these videos on YouTube and stuff, and sometimes I can't believe, it's insane. I wish I was in the crowd. Erik Pritz is an icon in the electronic music scene. Most known for his hits like Call On Me, or through his many aliases like Prida or Cyrus D, but he also sets the standard for live shows. He and his team are not only committed to creating a show-stopping spectacle, but to developing new technology to do things that haven't been done before. Pritz and his team have spent the past two years building Epic Holosphere, an 8 meter transparent LED sphere for him to perform in. It was his most technologically advanced production to date, but it only saw one show. Despite a successful premiere at Tomorrowland, part of the stage ceilings sank after the festival's first weekend, and the second show was canceled. Only one audience saw the Holosphere performance live, but first, The Verge got an exclusive look behind the scenes at how it all came together. It started off with Epic almost, I think it's almost 10 years ago now. And at the time, a lot of DJ acts and electronic music acts were doing, when they were doing shows it was all kind of like confetti cannons and fireworks and very much the same stuff like bands like Mertley Crew or Iron Maiden and stuff like that were doing back in the 80s, that kind of big arena. Which was fine at the time, and it was cool, but we just felt that we wanted to use kind of the technology that now is available, that wasn't available then, and just try and do an extension of the music. Epic stands for Erik Pritz and Concert. Over the years, Epic has included hundreds of laser beams, millions of video pixels, and colossal hologram-like illusions. We'd just done Epic 4 and 5, which was putting Epic, Erik in a cube, so we needed to move away from that. We all felt that a sphere at the time was incredibly ambitious. I do think that the whole sphere thing is actually, I think it was Liam. His idea was to do a sphere with a see-through LED material, so they would appear like holograms inside of it. To get a sense of how they planned to pull this off, I headed to Light Initiatives workshop to get a peek at construction. I was approached by Mark Calvert with a very interesting challenge to create a video sphere, and my first thought was, that's really hard. But immediately it was like, alright, how can we start to solve that? And the ideas came thick and fast. Oh, so this is actually how tall the sphere will be? That's right, yeah. That's it, yeah. Wow. Dang, this is massive. We've researched deeply the ways to which you could make a sphere, and we're confident that this way hasn't been done before. One of us came up with the idea to look at the spheres that you would find motorcyclists driving in at circuses. I think they're called the sphere of death or something like that? And I would just sit on YouTube just clicking through these videos late at night, just trying to figure out how they built them, because a lot of the form carries similarities to what we were trying to make. I was just watching these videos at night, just thinking, what am I doing with my life? Is this where this has come to? So with a plan in place and fabricators on deck, they start hammering away on building the holosphere. Everything you're seeing here has been custom made, even the LED strips that get snapped into the sphere's notches. But the actual sphere is only one part. It also needs lights, animations, and effects to bring the holosphere to life. The form that we're now using requires an entirely different pipeline to create the content. This is what the content looks like in its two-dimensional form. And that, when it's wrapped around the sphere, gives us the form that we're looking at here. The challenges in creating content for a spherical form are that the content needs to live in what I would call an equirectangular world. Equirectangular world. Equirectangular. And that's essentially what you would see if you were to take a camera and film 360 degrees around you. It gets flattened out into this kind of distorted, dreamy, bizarre-looking image where up is no longer up and left is no longer left and everything is just strange. So trying to get my head around creating content within that world was a real challenge. You kind of have to just change your thinking patterns almost into another different dimension. That sounds really crazy to say that, but it's true. I took this video on my phone of me just looking around rather dramatically and used that video to take into After Effects and track the motion of my pupil here. And that was able to drive the movement of the sphere within Cinema 4D. And what that gives is a very accurate motion and a very accurate animation which is essentially true to life. What a lot of people don't realize is that even though they buy a ticket and they come to see the show and it's two hours, but for us it's been two years. The team says they're unsure if there will be other Holosphere performances in the future. I asked for an official comment about what happened with Tomorrowland's Freedom Stage. Erik's manager Michael Serschel said due to safety concerns Tomorrowland decided to close the entire arena. We were absolutely devastated, especially as it was a situation beyond our control. But safety is always paramount. But Epic shows are known for being limited run events. Prids and his team accomplish their creative goal and now it's all about what's next. Our live shows, they will evolve and then after this something else will come. New technology will come available that we figure out a way to incorporate that and we will be able to do something that we haven't been able to do before. You know, it's just that on a continuous kind of organic way just refines itself and goes into different directions. This video is brought to you by Aloft, different by design. Thanks for watching, hope you enjoyed it and let us know what's the craziest show you've ever been to.