Unit1 Studio 演示可迁移虚拟形象演唱会，获 Balderton 2000 万美元投资

Avatar tech ready to rock ‘n’ roll…

In September, avatar concert producer Unit1 Studio demonstrated the capacity to tour/transfer/relocate shows. Another telling step towards the extraordinary.

Unit1 underlined the breakthrough by moving its KT Tunstall showcase from Hammersmith to a purpose-built studio at Tileyard, North London, a room designed to give a “totally immersive, convincing environment,” according to CEO Barney Wragg.

It’s a leap that asks big questions, not least what will wearers of those ‘I may be old but at least I got to see all the cool bands’ T-shirts do now? Unit1 is talking to artists who can’t/don’t want to tour anymore, and to the rights holders for myriad ‘cool’ acts no longer on the circuit. The potential to revisit classic gigs is there, right in front of us. Virtually.

Produced in partnership with Woodroffe Bassett Design, Brompton Technology, and Roe Visual, Tunstall’s short set celebrates the 20th anniversary of her Eye to the Telescope album while she does something completely different. Somewhere else.

“Until now, avatar concerts have been locked behind the economics of ABBA Voyage – a one-off, one-location proposition,” Daniel Waterhouse, General Partner at Balderton, the VC behind a recent $20m of new investment in Wragg and company’s work, said. “Unit1’s innovative new technology will fundamentally change that, opening up the genre to a whole generation of legacy artists.

“Barney is hugely respected in the industry and has managed to solve a structural problem that everyone knew existed, but nobody had cracked.”

The intimate scale of the Unit1 studio is crucial to delivering cost-efficient demonstrations, and it’s a unique opportunity to see an avatar and its supporting visuals up close.

Walking in there last week, I saw a stage with a microphone in a mic stand, on a riser, alongside some pedals. Sitting at the other end of the room, about 10 feet away, I knew we were going to see KT Tunstall, or a virtual KT Tunstall, but when ‘she’ comes on and casually introduces herself, I’m knocked out. It’s literally seamless. Tunstall works her guitar around the mic, and chats a bit between the songs. After the short show, KT points to the one pedal she hasn’t used, “I wonder what it does…” and then she’s gone. In a puff of confetti. As has the stage, the everything. I’m left looking at a bare screen, made of Roe’s Topaz TP1.5 panels, incidentally, their image quality, colour consistency, and precision supporting the considerable artistic vision and providing a baseline for the immersion.

“Even before you start to think about the content, you’ve got to think about the physics of the screen and what’s there,” Barney Wragg tells me afterwards. “Once you’ve got the fidelity right, the physics, so you could take a photograph or put a video on there and be two or three meters away from it, and it still feels like a crisp [picture], your next challenge is, how do we make an image, a digital image, an avatar image, that [sharp] and that detailed?”

The answer came by way of Unit1 Studio working with Patrick Woodruffe and Adam Bassett, watching KT on stage, ordering the specials, the props, the choreography, the lighting, in real time, in the actual environment.

“We had to sort of deconstruct the status quo for how you would build a show to get to something with a level of reality in an economic model that would allow us to be able to stage these things as a commercial venture going forward,” Wragg says.

“Adam spent hours moving lights around to get that sort of highlighted rim on [KT Tunstall’s] arm when she does something, because those are the things that your brain will naturally expect to see in a concert, from a performer,” Wragg says. “We have to create all of that.”

This is genie-out-of-the-bottle stuff and, like streaming, it will change the rock ‘n’ roll world makeup, and economy. There’s a finite measure of gig pounds/dollars/yen etc after all, and who will go and see, I struggled to make up a new band name to emphasise my point, ‘Joey & The Upstarts from Ealing’, if ‘Nirvana’ or the ‘Beatles’ are playing down the road?

“When Edison first started recording sound 100 and whatever years ago, everybody went, ‘Oh, what does this mean? How are we going to cope with this? A whole sort of commercial, legal, and technical framework evolved,” Wragg counters.

“This is a further evolution of being able to live record concerts and re-show them as movies or TV specials. Now, we could literally take you back to a particular concert, even if there wasn’t particularly high-quality recording of it. As long as we’ve got something that we can build these things [avatars] from.

“The frameworks about control are still there; we’re very focused on that and on making sure that absolutely every frame that anybody sees is totally approved and everybody’s happy with it. A big, big part of the difference between what we do and what a lot of AI companies do is that ours is built by artists. It’s built by people.”

This ain’t rock ‘n’ roll, but this ain’t cultural genocide either – thank you, David Bowie. It’s new model theatre, and, even at my most cynical, my most ‘keep music live’, I have to say it works.