Unity partners with Insomniac Events for immersive concerts

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Unity partners with live music company Insomniac Events to create interactive and immersive online concerts.

As part of the partnership, Unity’s team is helping Insomniac Events create an enduring world, or metaverse, the universe of virtual worlds all connected together, as seen in novels like Snow Crash and Ready Player One.

And this metaverse will be all about music, Peter Moore, Unity’s senior vice president of sports and live entertainment, said in an interview with GamesBeat.

Insomniac Event has nearly 30 years of experience creating concerts and community events, and it wants Unity to help it create a metaverse experience for its fans, where they can virtually gather and participate in live music performances, regardless of location. Insomniac hosts more than 10,000 events per year that are attended by more than seven million people.

Moore said talks with Insomniac accelerated as the pandemic broke out and live events were thrown into chaos. Unity has been working with Insomniac on the project for about nine months.

Insomniac’s premier annual event, Electric Daisy Carnival Las Vegas is the world’s largest dance music festival, attracting more than 525,000 fans over three days. The focus is on electronic dance music, and Moore said he came to the event with his wife to take it all in. I expect he was dancing all night. Moore said he suspected he was the oldest person there.

“They saw the writing on the wall about how they future-proof their experience,” Moore said. “We are building a virtual platform for them, not only for EDC, which will be our first festival, but also for future concerts.”

This partnership will bring a new Insomniac experience to fans in 2022. The goal is to immerse fans in non-stop music and play, with plenty of self-expression as dance culture expands from the physical world to the virtual world. They promise an interactive and engaging experience.

“It is an honor to partner with an incredible company like Unity on this new journey. Our vision is to create a social experience where everyone is a Headliner – where stories and music unite us in discovery, love and a true sense of belonging,” said Pasquale Rotella, CEO of Insomniac Events, in a statement. “Unity helps us create the world’s first experience for our community as we work together to deliver the next level of what the metaverse can be for entertainment and music.

Moore will speak in a session today at SXSW in Austin, Texas, where, along with a special video message from Pasquale Rotella, he will go into more detail about the collaboration. Insomniac wants to move to anytime, anywhere entertainment.

said Moor. “In the future, I believe you can travel to a concert to an arena to a stadium. And as we’ve been doing in sports for decades, you turn on the television and you can communicate. We’re going to push hard on this virtualization concept, with green screen technology, volumetric recording, mixed reality – all the things we do with AR and VR. We’re trying to bring some level of an interactive concert experience to life.”

The move represents another attempt by Unity to move beyond games with its interactive, real-time 3D (RT3D) content and creation tools.

Moore said the definition of creators is expanding beyond game developers to other types of creators, and game engines are becoming more pervasive across platforms. Unity has more than 1,800 people on its research and development team.

Unity and Insomniac Events are teaming up.

The company was founded by Pasquale Rotella and has been based in Los Angeles since its inception in 1993. In 2013, Insomniac partnered with global entertainment company Live Nation. Moore called Rotella a “legendary icon in the world of electronic dance music.”

Moore said there are other concert experiences for Fortnite and Roblox, where they hold virtual concerts in their pre-existing worlds. But he said Unity is building a platform for Insomniac in its own brand new virtual world.

“We love our partners like Wave, but we think we can add different layers of interactivity to what Wave does really well, where you interact and not just sit back and watch. This is the next iteration of that virtual entertainment platform. We’ll think differently than my friends at Epic or Roblox.”

Unity .’s concert experience

The Fortnite experience allowed Epic to gather tens of millions of fans to watch the in-game Travis Scott concert, but it was divided into groups of 100 people who could interact with each other. It can make game characters dance and light shows to enhance the experience.

“You have to find the balance between being able to find your friends and still feel like you have that huge environment of thousands of people around you. And that also takes time. We will have about the same where you are in an instance of the platform with your friends. But we can use NPCs (non-player characters) around you to give you the sense of scale and scope that you get at a regular concert. This marriage of these things happening at the same time would be really nice.

I asked why Unity did this application itself, instead of just providing the tools.

“We saw this as a way to use our own platform,” Moore said. “It’s all built in-house with our in-house solutions team, and figuring out best practices and then sharing them” will happen.

He added: “The belief was that we will see why we don’t just do it. Prove it out. Add this to the engine, if you like, as a product we could later call Unity Show, and then use it as a creative tool. This is a little different for what we do. But we thought the best way to do it was to do it ourselves and then share the lessons.”

the metaverse

I said it was exciting to see a new part of the metaverse take shape.

“We went all the way through it without saying metaverse,” Moore replied.

As for that metaverse, Moore said it will be a wide open world, hopefully better than previous attempts at it.

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This post Unity partners with Insomniac Events for immersive concerts

was original published at “https://venturebeat.com/2022/03/13/unity-partners-with-insomniac-events-on-immersive-concerts/”