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We Experienced PICO’s Millennium Realm VR Concert and Its Impressive Music Games

749 View2023-01-06

On January 3rd, VR headset and content provider PICO held a press conference in Beijing. They played a demo of CoCo Lee’s Millennium Realm VR Concert and announced that the concert’s full version would launch on January 7th on PICO’s platform.

After experiencing the VR concert demo, we found that the stage effects and CoCo‘s music performance with her avatar were fantastic and intriguing. Additionally, we were thoroughly impressed by the immersive drum music game and the Lotus Lantern energy-gathering music game. It was exciting to find ourselves taking a role in the concert and influencing the progress of the show.

The concert consists of four parts, Magical East, CoCo Lee’s Disco, Time Encounter, and Millennium Paradise. The songs have a wide range of styles, including Dow Ma Dan, Legend of the East, Di Da Di, Thinking of You 365 Days, etc. There will also be an Easter Egg section in the full version of the concert, where the audience can take photos with Coco when they make various gestures.

During our experience, one of the most exciting parts came from the dynamic Di Da Di music game. The audience can hit the beats, which were shown with floating notes, and become a part of the singer’s performance. During the more romantic Thinking of You 365 Days, we could pick up sparkly glitter, which was gathered in the last song as fireflies, and throw them into the scene. The ability to interact with the scene was very charming.

“We reached a consensus internally and in the industry that the charm of a VR concert is to make a bystander into a participant. So, the interactions between the users and the concert are a crucial part of such VR concerts,” said PICO’s main concert designers. “CoCo Lee has many music styles, and not all of them are suitable for music games. Di Da Di, the song we chose, is very fast and light-hearted with suitable beats.”

In general, VR performances are divided into 3DoF and 6DoF. DoF stands for Degrees of Freedom. The difference between the two concepts is that in 6DoF, the user can move freely around the scene to get a different view of the content, whereas 3DoF allows for movement and rotation of the head but keeps you at a fixed location to view the performance from. To many people, 6DoF is what constitutes a real VR experience, but many casual users are happy with the fixed viewing locations, especially considering the cost and hardware requirements of more advanced VR experiences.

Scenes in PICO’s Millennium Realm VR Concert

The difficulty of realizing 6DoF lies in designing and producing content for 360 degrees. During the process, the creators need to balance the audio effects of the concert, the delicate touch of PICO’s monitors, and the embedding of interactive music games. So, the difficulty resides in the whole management of the project instead of implementing a single technology.

Despite the difficulty of 6DoF, PICO’s designers overcame many obstacles that they encountered in the project’s development and research so that they could bring a better experience of immersion and interaction to the audience. At last, in PICO’s CoCo Lee VR concert, the audience will be able to move freely in the virtual scenes rather than sit in a fixed position.

Scenes in PICO’s Millennium Realm VR Concert

There are some similarities between building virtual humans in a concert and developing video games. They all involve integrating 3D assets into a timeline. But considering the one-hour duration of the concert, the number of art assets, the special effects, and the rendering ability of the VR headset, the main designers have made a cautious judgement on integrating all these parts.

But a VR concert has some differences from VR games in regards to the interactive scenes. The main creators of this VR concert said that theoretically, all PICO’s games could be made into a VR Concert, there are no technical boundaries, and the environments are all designed for VR and 6DoF. But a VR concert needs to take the music performance quality into consideration, and some audiences prefer to watch the show without interaction.

“As a user who does not interact at all, they can also get very good VR content, which is the basics. On these basics, the concert will involve some interactions that are more relevant to the content, rather than simply making a game," PICO’s creators said.

The main creators also introduced that in this concert, people in the same room can interact socially through bullet chat and voice chat.

Poster of PICO’s Millennium Realm VR Concert

PICO’s current concert can accommodate about 20 people in a room. For 6DoF real-time motion capture livestreaming, PICO will launch a smaller project that is related to daily life. In the future, larger-scale virtual idol concerts featuring motion capture and livestreaming will likely be held.

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