2023-11-18 10:20:10
The first thing to do is erase any previous experience with 3D from your head, forget about the antediluvian two-color glasses and other (failed) ideas piled up on the train of history, and prepare for the ‘shock’. The impact, as soon as you put on the immersive glasses, is important, as a challenge to the senses, and as you get used to it, a matter of seconds or minutes, you may feel (dangerously) tempted to lose sight of the real world. If we can continue calling it that.
The Meta Quest 2 virtual reality glasses and headsets, with Oculus lenses, the model tested by this journalistplaces you in front of a three-dimensional mural in which a menu with all its applications is displayed, from which you can select the musical offering, using separate controllers or ‘joysticks’ with their laser pointers (one in each hand) and seeing yourself, for example, in a flash placed in the middle of a concert by the American singer and rapper Macklemore. Not in any location, but on the same stage, feeling like a mix of spy and ‘premium’ guest, sharing the situation with the artist and his backup singers and instrumentalists.
A kind of battery
You turn your head and the visual plane continues, and you see the audience singing the songs, singing, getting up, dancing, configuring an immersive situation. You are part of the audience from a place of privilege. Which allows for many other uses related to music, such as attending a drum tutorial where the teacher plays cymbals and timpani within an arm’s length of your nose. There you can capture details and changing nuances that are inaccessible in a traditional YouTube video.
J. Balvin, Travis Scott and Billie Eilish are some of the artists who have offered concerts on Meta, the Facebook company. It has been reconstructed to the ‘show’ of an artist who is no longer with us, the rapper Notorious BIG (murdered in 1997 at the age of 24), revived in the form of a hyper-realistic avatar. And they feed the mural with immersive k-pop ‘shows’, Korean pop, which is one step ahead.
These advances are interpreted as an access path to the metaverse. For now, the sensation that Meta Quest produces, in applications for live music, offers a realism that is very competitive with the traditional physical episode. And compared to the usual concert, you save traveling and, perhaps, queues, pushing, views blocked by annoying heads or floors sticky with beer.
And the social factor, sharing the concert? It will become possible as the meeting with other users, represented by avatars, in that parallel reality is perfected. But we’re not talking about science fiction anymore. Immersion allows you to forget that you live, say, in a small mezzanine without light and feel installed in a tropical mansion or a high triplex in Manhattan, a place from which you gracefully parade towards the best possible location for your favorite artist’s ‘show’. Yes, it will be very tempting to stay and live forever in the metaverse.
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