Through the Fire: AR Concert Experience
What if a live concert could be enhanced with augmented reality? This project explores the process of creating an immersive concert experience for attendees, utilizing their phones to bridge the gap between the physical and digital worlds.
Role
Production Manager and Designer
Year
Spring 2024
Tools
Resolume, AfterEffects, Figma, MagicQ
Objective:
Our primary goal was to explore the concert experience by allowing users to interact with music in an interactive way. Our group was assigned the amazing artist ChiTheRealist and we were tasked with representing his music in an Interactive manner. The song that was the anchor for the project was "Through the Fire" which details Chis experience surviving a house fire and loosing everything but his music equipment. Chi expressed interest in performing live as he had not performed in nearly a year. So our task as a group was to represented the raw emotive nature of his music in a new way. We settled on an image target based AR solution to help aid the story.
AR Development:
Our team utilized 8th Wall to bring our graphics to life by integrating them into a custom virtual environment. The graphics, initially designed in collaboration with artists, were transferred into Unreal Engine, where we crafted the virtual environment to enhance the overall experience. This environment was displayed on a wall, allowing us to use certain key frames as image targets for 8th Wall.
8th Wall played an integral role in this process as a web AR platform, simplifying the barrier to entry for users. While using a web AR platform required us to narrow our scope, it allowed us to shift our focus to on-screen graphics. This also made the development process simpler for our dev team as we were able to shift our deployment from a lobby style application to an individual application.
By employing AR image targets, we anchored critical elements of the songs and triggered them by displaying these targets on the wall or integrating them into the room with physical elements. The image targets made the process straightforward, enabling us to trigger any desired element in real-time. However, we had to be judicious in our approach, ensuring that we didn't use overly complex assets in the scene, as this could detract from both the on-screen graphics and the performance itself.
User Interaction:
Users interacted with the concert through their smartphones, which displayed AR graphics in sync with the live music. They could manipulate certain elements, creating a personalized and engaging experience.
Role and Responsibilities:
I was responsible for creating and managing production assets. This involved conceptualizing and designing graphics that would integrate with the AR environment and the live concert setting. This was a fun branding opportunity because I also got to create all the intro graphics and scrollers though the event.
3D Design:
Partnering with my amazing group mate Jason he was able to use Unreal Engine to create the animated backdrop for out anchor song. In Cinema 4D and Blender, I designed a few 3D elements that contributed to the immersive AR experience. These included intricate models and animations that interacted dynamically with the music.
Media Server Management:
Leveraging Resolume as the media server, I was responsible for playback of all visual assets. User Interaction:
Lighting:
All lighting was wing through Chamsys Magic Q. Fixtures involved Arri S60 and Arri L10
Partnerships:
I would be remiss to finish off writing this case study with out giving thanks to and appreciating all the partners. In order to push the concert feel out group worked along sides RIT BARS in order to market and promote the event. The expressed they would like an opportunity for their artist to perform on a large scale and as a group we needed help marketing and promoting the event. They were invaluable during the process and helped us extend the project from just an AR experience but also an artist showcase.
Our Professors Susan Lakin and Joe Geigle helped immensely during the process and who showed up every step of the way despite any of the challenges.
Special shoutout to RIT MAGIC and Eric Maslow
Outcomes and Learnings:
The project was a success, It was very interesting getting to represented an artist music in a new manner. Although we didn't stray too far from the conventional concert, I genuinely feel as if we were able to play with the idea of what concert visuals could look like and be.