Metastage Launches AR App With First-Ever Holographic Performances By Laura Rizzotto
But where the VR consumer market is still relatively small, there are billions of smartphones that can run AR. Metastage’s app, developed in partnership with Magnopus (the company behind immersive experiences for Pixar’s Coco and Blade Runner: 2049) allows anyone to incorporate these holograms into their daily lives.
“An augmented reality app in and of itself is not groundbreaking, but the holographic performance we are premiering with Laura Rizzotto absolutely is,” Heller said. “This is a new way to experience music and your favorite performers.”
For Heller, part of launching this app is as a scout mission—a vehicle to experiment and test hypotheses. When she set out to launch the AR companion to the studio, she wanted to go big—something that showcased the strengths of the medium and simultaneously caught people’s attention to drive conversation.
“Her voice is incredible, she’s a great dancer, and her songs are incredibly catchy—she is Pop at its best,” Heller said. “When we approached her to do this with us, we wanted to launch with a full unreleased song, and we wanted to go big with it. Because she is independent, she can call her own shots, and we were lucky enough to get the ‘One More Night’ premiere as a hologram on the Metastage app.
“For the first time ever, users can tailor the artist’s performance to their own taste and comfort,” said Carolina Rizzotto, who co-produced Laura Rizzotto’s Metastage Experience. “You can take Laura and choose where she’ll perform and even change her capture size. You can make her twice her normal size...or you can even make her the size of an ant and have her perform in your own hand.”
“For the hologram experience, I was on a green screen stage surrounded by 106 cameras, which were capturing me from every possible angle. I had to keep in mind a specific radius boundary for my movements, in order to make sure my body was fully captured, as well as how my performance would look from various angles.”
“We’re about to launch a volumetric performance library of stock assets for game engine that we’re calling, simply, ‘Metastage Captures,’” Heller said. “The assets are regular people in regular clothes doing everyday actions like talking, listening, looking around, etc., on short loops.”