In recent years, the act of live-streaming festivals has become increasingly popular at large festivals such as Bonnaroo and Coachella. For the most part, large festivals delegate a sizeable budget to hiring out a live-streaming production company like Bulldog Digital Media for promotional purposes (Knopper, “Why Live Concert Streaming Has Yet To Take Off”). Ultimately what a company like Bulldog Digital Media does is bring their live video-streaming production expertise to a festival by advising them on how to go about streaming the festival in the most promotionally effective manner possible. For example, Bulldog Digital Media advertises on their website that the webcast of Bonnaroo 2013, which they were hired out for, attracted over 11 million viewers who watched the festival via the interactive live broadcasting service USTREAM. Unfortunately, most stream events don’t generate revenue from the streams themselves as indicated by Alex Pham, a senior correspondent at Billboard (Hjelmgaard, “Live and not near you: The streamed concert). Also, due to how new the phenomenon of live video-streaming is, there currently is not an established business model in place with a clear source of revenue to draw upon according to Mark Mulligan, a consultant and adviser to the music industry (Hjelmgaard, “Live and not near you: The streamed concert). Essentially, although a ton of people around the world are tuning in from the comfort of their homes, there really is no payout, and despite viewing the concert, it’s really not the same as actually being there at the concert itself. Herein lies the need for a technological device like virtUoso.

 

VirtUoso is a multi-modal virtual-reality headset, auditory device, and live video-streaming system that effectively renders the experience of being at a live concert all while being in the confines of your home. Building upon the camera systems that are utilized by music festivals for live-streaming purposes, virtUoso is capable of rendering the live environment of a music festival via its headset. This feat is accomplished through virtUoso’s live-streaming production system that boasts the means of supplying festival promoters with virtual reality image capturing cameras, which are able to render a virtual image perception, which can best be compared to the visuals one perceives naturally from standing in the crowd at a festival. That data is sent wirelessly to virtUoso’s server which disseminates the data to all virtUoso users’ head-sets. Now you’re probably thinking, what if I don’t like standing in a certain spot for the entirety of a festival? VirtUoso’s system caters to individuals that desire experiencing a wide array of vantage points by reappropriating the current camera system used to live video streaming festivals today. For example, as opposed to having a video editor compose various video sequences recorded by moving cameras positioned throughout the venue, which is best exemplified by the live video stream, virtUoso offers you the capability to switch between different virtual reality vantage points that are rendered by cameras planted throughout the festival. With virtUoso you can toggle from being in several places throughout the crowd which ranges from the front row to all the way to the back of the crowd (if you are into that scene), to having a bird’s-eye view via a camera-equipped drone, and to even experiencing the concert through the perspective of the performer. VirtUoso does all this on top of mimicking the auditory acoustics of said music festival, which varies with the position you choose within the crowd. If you enjoy the view from the front row but prefer the sound level you get from being in the back row, with virtUoso you can mix and match your auditory and visual landscape position to your heart’s desire. With virtUoso you get your own perfect personal concert experience all from the confines of your household.

To give you an idea what it is like to see things through virtUoso, watch the following pre-performance trailer, which through the usage of virtUoso, whisks you away from your home and into the Upper West Side loft where Ransom himself resides. Video.

In his book, What Technology Wants, Kevin Kelly states the following: “We know that genetically our bodies are changing faster now than at any time in the past million years. Our minds are being rewired by culture” (Kraus, 235). Kraus’s opinion that we as humans “are being rewired by culture” lends itself to Katherine Hayles’ concept of technogenesis—the idea that humans and technology effectively evolve and develop together. Currently, we live in a society that demands that the technology we utilize to interact with digital media be what Hayles terms as “multimodal,” meaning that the technology provides the user with the capability to interact with new media in a multitude of different ways. She provides evidence that corroborates the claim that a multimodal-obsessed culture exists today by drawing on the “Generation M” report conducted by the Kaiser Family Foundation whose findings she paraphrases in the following statement: “[The report] indicate[s] that young people (ages eight to eighteen in their survey) spend, on average, an astonishing six hours per day consuming some form of media and often multiple forms at once…Going along with the shift is a general increase in information intensity, with more and more information available with less and less effort” (99). VirtUoso caters to just this young media-obsessed demographic, specifically that of 13-18 year olds, the age range at which most kids become interested in attending a music festival, with its multi-faceted, versatile heads-up display (HUD), which allows for kids to view all the settings that virtUoso offers including one’s preferred angle of view, acoustic environment, and vantage point—all without infringing on the visual and auditory virtual festival experience virtUoso renders for the user. Based off the findings of the “Generation M” report, the virtUoso HUD takes into consideration the current generational shift of accessing a wide array of information with little to no effort by making so that users can trigger commands and change settings displayed via virtUoso’s HUD all through the use of one’s voice. No need to exhaust oneself with the use of a mouse or controller to bring up and navigate the virtual map of various vantage points that the virtUoso headset can display for a user when you can just articulate with the use of your voice the action that you wish virtUoso to enact. There is a general consensus amongst educators in the UK that the attention spans of children are becoming increasingly shorter as they opt for screen-based activities over conventional reading (Brech, “Shorter attention span: The impact of technology on our brains”). Therefore, as the attention span of children shortens ,they are less likely to interact with a media device that doesn’t provide a high degree of stimulation of multiple senses for a long period of time. Many children consider an hour as a long period of time so with that in mind most children would consider five hours, the usual length of a day at a music festival, as an eternity. That is why the virtual reality festival environment that virtUoso renders perfectly for its users brings the intense visual and auditory stimulation that music festivals have become known for to virtUoso users, effectively captivating their attention for an extended period of time.

Here is a video that showcases one of the various vantage points virtUoso users can toggle within the virtUoso HUD.

 

The distribution model that virtUoso builds upon is that of its video game counterpart, the Oculus Rift. We are in the process of creating development kits for festival promoters to test out for themselves in the hope that they will elect to reallocate their live video-streaming production budget to that of the virtual reality services virtUoso provides for its users. This reallocation of said festival’s budget is promoted further by virtUoso’s business model which charges its user the 30% off the value of a festival pass to access the festival via virtUoso on top of the one time charge of $200 dollars for the purchase of the combined audio/visual virtUoso headset. The company that is virtUoso takes a 20% cut of all virtUoso access pass profits with the other 80% going toward the festival promoter. This business model is way more financially beneficial to that of live video-streaming in that the festival promoter is able to generate a revenue stream similar to that generated by ticket sales through the use of virtUoso’s services, wherein the ad generated revenue stream that promoters make off live video-streaming is next to nothing.

Ultimately with virtUoso, festivals are going to bring in more festival-goers than ever before in the form of virtual reality viewers. Teenagers who don’t have the money or time to fly out to Tennessee for Bonnaroo or California for Coachella can now effectively, with very little effort, transport themselves virtually to the festival all while remaining in the confines of their own homes. Children are evolving with the current technological trends, and it’s time for the technology to adapt to them. VirtUoso is that technological adaptation to the current generation’s needs and desires.

Works Cited:

Hayles, Katherine. How We Think: Digital Media and Contemporary Technogenesis. Chicago: U of Chicago, 2012. Print.

Hjelmgaard, Kim. “Live and Not near You: The Streamed Concert.” USA TODAY. N.p., 13 Sept. 2013. Web. 8 Nov. 2014.

Kelly, Kevin. What Technology Wants. New York: Viking, 2010. Print.

Knopper, Steve. “Why Live Concert Streaming Has Yet To Take Off.”Billboard. N.p., 21 Feb. 2014. Web. 10 Nov. 2014.