Redpill VR - Making virtual music a reality
Following our successful first closing, Hartmann Capital’s new fund, Hartmann Metaverse Ventures I has begun to allocate to the best founders in Web3. For the next few weeks, the research team will be presenting the investment cases for our first investments. Join us as we uncover the hidden gems that we believe will be the future of the metaverse.
This week Hartmann Capital metaverse analyst Daniel Derzic along with CIO Felix Hartmann covers Redpill VR, a platform for the creation, distribution and monetization of AAA virtual music performances. Our investment will enable Redpill VR to accelerate its cloud streaming efforts, web3 strategy, and roll-out a public beta.
Digital Entertainment in the Post-Covid World
Without a doubt, the COVID-19 pandemic has forced us to re-imagine what entertainment looks like in a digital first world. Meetings have permanently moved from the board room to zoom, work has gone from the office to the discord server, and entertainment has gone virtual, with VR headsets having their breakout year in 2021. It was in the depths of the pandemic that countless people first listened to DJs livestream performances from their bedroom. “Virtual concerts” became more normalized, although their UX/UI remained as simple as a twitch stream. Bigger productions, such as Travis Scott’s performance inside Fortnite gave a glimpse of what the future could look like.
Time and distance are no longer barriers to fans. Electronic music producers, maybe more than any other music genre, have discovered ways to interact with fans thousands of miles away. While some of these virtual music experiences may still be lacking in tactile realism unless one combines the experience with haptics such as SUBPAC, they more than make up for it with stunning visuals and interactivity you simple don’t get in physical reality. Travis Scott’s Fortnite performance for example took place across perhaps a dozen environments, from the depths of the ocean to outer space. Being able to reach fans across time and space makes the entire experiential aspect of performances more scaleable. Whether a fan is in a remote country the artist would not travel to, physically disabled, or too young or economically disadvantaged to attend a physical live performance, no longer matters as the performance happens everywhere and anywhere with an internet connection.
VR music is appealing to artists who can use the ever-improving VR technology to establish direct and personal connections with their audiences. It is equally attractive to audiences, superfans and casual listeners alike. Superfans crave the closer relationships with creators that are easily facilitated with technology, and less committed listeners can experience a live event without the high costs and time commitments involved with in-person shows.
When artists include their listeners in the development of their music, they are able to forge relationships that will continue much beyond a single live performance.
Enter Redpill VR – the Future of Live Performance
Source: Redpill VR
There can be no doubt that the metaverse is here to stay. Facebook says so, but also the hardware has finally arrived to turn virtual reality into, well, reality. While there are many companies focused on applying the latest in tech, such as the new Oculus headset, to music, Redpill VR goes far beyond any other existing platform in the digital live performance sector.
After closing their Series B funding in early 2019 through a private strategic investor, they started to build an Unreal 4 VR development team for their Los Angeles studio. The start-up has been developing an immersive platform that transforms music events into enchanted woods filled with interactive and engaging environments, from colorful orbs and floating bubbles that guests can freely explore with their avatars. By simulating the performer, DJ, artist, or vocalist as an avatar, they are able to “virtualize” the whole performance from start to finish, allowing for indefinite audience scaling beyond the four walls of a typical venue. These experiences are available in VR (with, e.g., Oculus), 2D, and 3D.
The company’s tech can be used to scan live performers to create high-resolution 3D avatars that can be managed through sensors mounted to an artist’s body. This enables any artist, venue, or music enthusiast to create and share communal music experiences in an elevated metaverse. Redpill VR will allow millions of consumers to experience live music events from the warmth of their own homes. The team is putting in an enormous amount of effort to ensure a VR experience that is constantly improving, and is superior to what the market has out there.
That's why they are still in beta / early access and will go live when they have finished further optimization work.
In the coming months, it is planned to introduce a cloud-based streaming version, which will then also allow users without high-end hardware to use the platform on almost any device. Acknowledging its innovative spirit, Redpill has been awarded three patents for its deep learning source separation technique and the application of source separation for music visualization.
Source: Redpill VR
The platform not only aims to create lifelike avatars, but also to deliver a very impressive soundscape. It will be powered by the Venice engine, that is the industry's first real-time source separation and visualization pipeline. Source directivity, distance modeling, latency rates, and other specific factors are carefully programmed and integrated to ensure an absolutely realistic audio experience. These capabilities enable Unreal Engine 4 to handle visual content in real-time. Presently, 8 channels with associated metadata are supported and synced, allowing for the creation of visual, spatial, interactive, and social music.
Unlike other platforms, Redpill models 3D virtual performances by placing numerous 360-degree cameras on stage. Using a VR headset, the spectator feels as if they're on stage with the band, but from the comfort of their own living room, or really anywhere. In fact, the firm has transformed a 5,500-square-foot property on Sunset Boulevard into a studio capable of holding events for up to 200 guests. The facility will test a novel mix of live, in-person events, and virtual reality live streams. To ensure that both parties benefit from the experience, the business built a 144-square-foot 3D LED wall capable of displaying the same vivid images that VR viewers tuning in from afar see in their headsets.
Source: edm.com
Virtual reality has the potential to revolutionize the way we experience live music and Redpill is at the forefront of this transformation, by leveraging technological innovation with a forward-thinking perspective. The metaverse, being a universe of its own, gives us the opportunity to explore a world of possibilities that basically transcend the limitations of our physical universe.
CONCLUSIONS
The market size for a company like Redpill is in the deca-billions. It not only replaces event production companies but also ticketing companies like LiveNation all the while taking a bite out of gaming and streaming. The reason we believe that now is the time to back a company like Redpill, is the perfect storm of accessibility of VR hardware, emergence of edge cloud-streaming, and the rise of the metaverse. If Redpill succeeds at conquering music and live events, it has actually achieved a much bigger milestone that validates it being worth even more, and that is it becoming the defacto platform for networking and hanging out in the metaverse. While games go after linear entertainment, Redpill is creating non-linear experiences that can scale and be repeated.
We at Hartmann Capital are proud to be backing this revolutionary technology. Having kicked the tires of a number of music VR startups, we believe that Redpill VR has the tech (that is notably live and useable today) and the right people with decades of experience to make this vision a reality.