Engage XR produced a 45-minute “Eat Sleep VR Repeat” – Immersive Metaverse Concert in collaboration with Fatboy Slim’s Norman Cook that showed in a limited screening on March 30, 2023. It was an incredibly, mind-bending and groundbreaking VR concert experience that combined novel interactions and social dynamics, but also a trippy and psychedelic journey through the mind and music of Norman Cook. I had a chance to catch a press preview of this virtual concert on March 28th, and then unpack the creative process with Engage XR’s Head of Studio David McDermott and Fatboy Slim’s own Norman Cook on March 31, 2023 after they had finished all of their screenings. No news of upcoming shows has been released yet, and I’ll try to keep these show notes updated with more information on future concerts, as this was certainly an experience not to be missed.
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Music: Fatality
Rough Transcript
[00:00:05.412] Kent Bye: The Voices of VR Podcast. Hello, my name is Kent Bye and welcome to the Voices of VR podcast. It's a podcast that looks at the future of spatial computing. You can support the podcast at patreon.com slash Voices of VR. So in today's episode, I'm going to be diving deep into a really, really amazing immersive VR concert experience that I had a chance to see on the Engage XR platform. It was by Fatboy Slim and the Engage team, and it was called Eat, Sleep, VR, Repeat. It was an immersive metaverse concert that happened on March 30th, 2023. I had a chance to see it at the press preview there on Tuesday, March 28, 2023. It was a 45-minute experience with five or six different scenes and really one of the best VR concert experiences that I've had. I've seen a lot of really amazing work that's coming out of VRoom. That's VRRoom. They collaborated with folks like Jean-Michel Jarre and been doing some really high fidelity experiences within the context of VRChat. And so I think that Vroom has been really pioneering a lot of these different VR concert experiences. And so this piece that Engage did with Norman Cook, aka Fatboy Slim, was taking music that was immensely popular in the early 90s and stuff that I was a huge fan of back in the day. And so I was very familiar with listening to this album of You've Come a Long Way, Baby, It's got a lot of really famous tracks and, you know, including the famous Weapon of Choice, which is one of those music videos that was directed by Spike Jonze. So Fatboy Slim's been working with a lot of really amazing visionary directors over the years, and the way that Norman Cook describes it is stupid or irreverent or things that are kind of in this surrealistic psychedelic vein that really grabs people's attention and allows you to break out of your normal mode of being and breaking out of the shackles of your existing way of looking at the world. So just really mind bending music videos that he's done in the past. And this whole immersive VR experience is like that, but times a million because you're immersed into this world that is trying to do that through all the different spatial affordances of VR. So I had a chance to actually sit down with Norma Cook and David McDermott. I was actually on the road traveling at the VMed conference in LA. And so I was able to do this interview remotely after they had just done this whole day long of immersive concert experiences. It's worth noting that they do plan to bring this back at some point. At this point, I haven't heard exactly when. Maybe in the show notes, check to see if they've made any announcements as to when you can actually get a chance to see it. Because as always, I do always recommend folks to have a direct embodied experience because we will be diving into both the immersive experience that I had and talking about their own creative process. So. But in the absence of being able to have your own experience with it, then you can hear our breakdown of the experience and why I think it was one of the most amazing VR concert experiences that I've had so far within VR. So that's what we're coming on today's episode of the Voices of VR podcast. So this interview with David and Norman happened on Friday, March 31st, 2023. So with that, let's go ahead and dive right in.
[00:03:07.795] David McDermott: Hi, my name is David McDermott, so I've worked in the game industry for 20-something years on various console games, and now working with Engage XOR, creating content, events, and lots of other VR or interactive projects, so a lot of fun.
[00:03:23.756] Norman Cook: My name is Norman Cook. I'm also professionally known as Fatboy Slim. I'm normally a DJ and producer, but I've entered the magical world of VR thanks to Engage for this event stroke project stroke experiment. So I'm currently sort of a psychedelic fish out of water.
[00:03:43.612] Kent Bye: Awesome. And maybe each of you could give a bit more context as to your background and your journey into working with VR.
[00:03:50.533] Norman Cook: Well, like I said, I'm primarily a DJ and a music producer, and so I had no real background in the world of VR or anything more high-tech than playing digital audio files via a laptop on stage. And so the invitation came from Engage to do a VR show. I'd done one VR show with the organisers of Glastonbury Festival during the lockdown, which was a recreation of one of the stages at Glastonbury. But it was very much a straight performance, which kind of sort of tickled me, but I didn't feel that we'd really created anything special. It was kind of one of those sort of, this will do in lockdown events. But when Engage came to me, they said they kind of wanted to do something a bit more exciting and push the boundaries a bit further. So for us, it was quite an experiment. It was quite a leap of faith. Along the way, we had to kind of engage somebody who'd worked with me in the past, Tim Fleming, who has got a background in VR. He was very much the conduit between the language that the Davids speak and the language that I speak. So it was a very big leap into the unknown, a very exciting one for us. And at the moment, it feels like a very productive one.
[00:05:07.568] David McDermott: Yeah. Well, my story is not as interesting, but I've worked in the games industry in various countries. So I started my career off in the UK. So I lived there for a good few years. I think at that time I got a feel for the culture. And for me, it was a very exciting time. First going to a very big developed country compared to the quieter life I was used to. And then I worked in Australia and in games companies in Japan. So I got to see games production methods in lots of different studios. And it was a really broadening, exciting experience. And I'm just delighted that I got to come back to Ireland to actually put all that games experience into practice for Engage XR. So it's a dream story for me. I'm absolutely delighted.
[00:05:52.394] Kent Bye: Awesome. Well, I know that I've been covering Engage and its evolution over the years and, you know, I see it as kind of like a corporate platform doing a lot of educational stuff, but this was a little bit of a turn towards entertainment. And I have to say that is one of the most mind-bending, amazing, immersive, interactive, social, virtual concert experiences I've had. in the industry. So I was really quite blown away with everything. So I'd love to hear where you started with designing this experience, because it's got a lot of innovations when it comes to immersive, interactive, social experience, but it's also got a broader like psychedelic twist. And for me, you know, I got your album Better Living Through Chemistry Norm back in like 1996. I was like listening to that on repeat whenever I would drive in my car. So it like took me back to a very specific time and place in my life that was this aspect of nostalgia or memories that I had that were also remixed into this immersive experience. So for me, it was like this perfect storm of memories and excitement and dancing. So yeah, quite mind-bending. But I'd love to just, first of all, hear where you started with this as a piece, because it's also a turn for Engage in some ways.
[00:07:10.563] Norman Cook: Well, for me, the overriding thing that I was most excited about, now, I didn't even possess a VR headset. I'd had a couple of experiences with my kids of maybe putting their maid's ones on and doing that thing where you'd go up the lift and walk off the edge of the building. But I had no background in VR at all. But what really turned me on was the pitch that was, rather than trying to recreate being at a gig, it was trying to recreate where I try and take people to in a gig. because my shows, the idea is for a couple of hours, you kind of escape reality and you go into this psychedelic world of love and music and nonsense. That's kind of a role of dance music is to help you escape for a few hours. And the idea of using VR to actually escape reality So they pitched it as like, won't be a gig that could ever happen in the real world. It'd be like a fantasy gig and we can do pretty much anything. It's like just we're lonely, limited by imagination. And the thing that really sold me was when they said, like, it's a voyage into your brain. And like you said, whichever things you pick up from my music, whether you know, listening on long road trips or where the psychedelic places that hopefully I've taken people in the shows, it's all about that kind of journey and a journey through my head sounded like something that. potentially impossible to pull off, but let's have fun trying. So it was great because all the way through the process of making it, they were trying to pit what I, you know, my reference points. So all those reference points are things about the music that I've made or the places I've been or how my mind, you know, what I've tried to put into my music. So it felt like it was bringing it all to life, which is very exciting for me. A bit strange, a bit weird at times. The first time I actually did navigate myself around my own brain, in VR was very interesting. And yeah, so over the past year, year and a half, we've been doing it. Yeah. Just inviting the Engage crew into my world. They came to a couple of my shows so they could experience what we do in the shows. But yeah, for me, the most exciting thing was to create and I watched a couple of other VR gigs. And it's the idea of taking it further than doing the stuff that you can't do the real gig. Anyone go to a real gig. But how about the stuff that can never really happen in real life? Because it's too dangerous or just physically impossible. And I thought that was exciting. And I think that's what most people have picked up about the experience is we've gone a bit further than other people in making it a fantasy rather than trying to recreate an actual gig.
[00:09:45.917] David McDermott: Yeah. And on a practical level, just in the pre-production phase, we're really lucky. I mean, getting to work with Norm on this was fantastic because, as you were saying, you were new to VR, but you were totally invested from day one. So we'd have story sessions and brainstorming sessions, and I would gather together all the ideas that came from Norm's team and I would storyboard it all up. And then I do a weekly catch up with Tim Fleming, who does fantastic design and video art and stuff. And all of these different elements and the art elements from Norm's music videos and things inspired a lot of the characters in it. So and then I'd have the nerve wracking presentation of showing them to everybody in front of Norm and the team. So that was It was like Shark Tank for art, kind of very perceptive and really good feedback and very honest feedback as well. So I think that really helped us get the ideas together before we even went into making it in VR.
[00:10:45.551] Norman Cook: Can I just ask you one technical question that just cropped up in my mind? So basically, we would have kind of monthly meetings where we would meet in VR. But I've just realized that in VR, obviously, my avatar would be completely deadpan about what we were experiencing. But I've just realized we always had the Zoom meeting still on. And you always say, well, mute the audio because we'd get a little bit of feedback between VR and the Zoom session. But I've just realized that you might have been sneakily watching my actual expressions in real life. while I was experiencing the VR.
[00:11:18.456] David McDermott: If we saw like a little low chuckle going on there, we're like, thank God, thank God.
[00:11:24.966] Norman Cook: I've only just rumbled that one. Yeah.
[00:11:28.358] Kent Bye: Nice. Well, first of all, I want to ask because this was like a one day event that happened yesterday. I had a opportunity to see it during like a press preview, which for me also was just quite amazing because it was like all these people that I know from the VR industry and that there was another dimension that it made it so that there was a group of people, a cohort of really high level VR developers who've seen quite a lot of stuff. And you were checking out their outfits, right? Yeah, the outfits, they were dynamically changing. That was another thing that was a lot of fun is because people had their avatar representations, but they were being remixed and modulated throughout the entire piece. But the social dimension, I think, was quite unique because it was like a cohort of VR people that have been in the industry for years and years and years, they've seen a lot of stuff. The amount of collective awe and wonder that was coming out of that crew also made it be like, I was having those moments of awe and wonder, but everybody was also having them. There was so much that was going on, there was people pointing out stuff, they were interacting with things that I might have missed. There was a dimension of the social experience of a concert experience that I had never quite experienced something quite like that. So because of that, I wanted to ask, first of all, this was a one day event, what's happening with this in the future? Are people ever going to be able to see this again? And what's the future plans just so as we're talking about it, people can have a sense as to like, okay, now they want to stop listening to what we're talking about. And they want to go experience it and then maybe come back. And after they've seen it sort of listen to us breaking down. So yeah, I'd love to hear like, what happens next with this piece?
[00:12:59.390] David McDermott: Well, I don't think there's any concrete information at the moment, but I'm absolutely sure that something will be done in the future and there's going to be something happening again in relation to this. So I would defer those questions to our CEO, David Whelan. He's the man with the master plan. So you'll be able to fill us in when and if it's happening.
[00:13:19.658] Norman Cook: It's definitely our intention for it to run and run. You know, we spent a lot of time building it, so it's not just going to be a one off.
[00:13:26.416] Kent Bye: Awesome. Yeah, that's great to hear just because I think it's, it would be a shame for all that to happen and then it'd be just like a one moment event because I think it is a lot of groundbreaking visionary integrations for what the medium can do. And Norm, I wanted to ask you because I think your work has a history of working with like visionary directors like Spike Jones and a lot of different types of iconic images I have of the surrealistic exploration of your music, but having another visual component of a music video. And so I'd love to hear a little bit about your process of creation for how you were making music videos, because in this immersive VR experience, there's a lot of reference points to your prior work with the translation of your music into music videos and the different characters like Christopher Walken and other easter eggs that are spread out through the piece of this immersive experience. So yeah, I'd love to hear a little bit more about your historical process of how you've translated some of your music into music videos and how that insights may have been translated into this new medium of VR.
[00:14:28.560] Norman Cook: I think, well, I mean, you touched on Spike Jonze. It all started with Spike Jonze. Until then, I had a career in the music industry where I was making videos that the record company wanted me to make, and videos that kind of satisfy your ego as a performer, or they try and make you look younger or more sexy, and it's all about selling the product. Now, Spike came with this angle, and he came and found me and said, I want to do a video for you. And his videos were just completely, everything was wrong. I wasn't in them for starters. It didn't make the music more glamorous. They were stupid, but they made people laugh and they turned people on. And it unlocks the idea that I could work with visionary people who weren't necessarily commercial. And the record company would go with and go, right, we can see the value in doing something really stupid. But also, I think the most important points are once you get into the surreal, I mean, most of my tunes haven't really got a huge message. It's not like I'm trying to tell a particular story or anything like that. So you can take the sense of them or the irreverence of them or the surreal nature and you can run with it. So after I'd done the Praise You video with Spike and the gangster tripping one with Roman Coppola, where he just blew shit up in slow motion, once we'd done those two, then all these directors wanted to come to work with me. And I would just say to them, like, what's your really stupid idea that, you know, and it doesn't, there was never a subject content in the song. that said, well, you can't do that. It's like, well, that'll fit and that'll just make that song come alive. And you think about Christopher Walken tap dancing in midair or the guys in the Your Mama video where they just lose control of their bodies. Things like that are just fun. And when I was working with the Engage crew, there were moments in the creative process where they were trying to be too literal with it. They were trying to tell a story or they were trying to make sense out of it all. I was like, forget sense. This isn't what we're trying to do. We're doing entertaining nonsense. And I remember saying to them, like, you must have things you've always wanted to do in VR, gags that you've always wanted to do. Here's your chance. So a lot of those gags were just like, you know, here is something you've always wanted the license to do. And obviously they knew far more what is capable of doing in the metaverse than I was. So I gave them quite a free rein to not take me to literally, but just to have fun with entertaining people.
[00:16:51.103] David McDermott: Yeah. I mean, from our point of view, I think the trust and the willingness to try something totally new and experimental. We're so lucky to be working together with you. As well as that, we tried a lot of new things, too. There was a lot of new technology that went into this performance, and there was a lot of upgrades on the Engage platform. So we've really upgraded our ability to scale sessions. The interaction code is a new node system that is in beta and hopefully will be coming in later in the year for public release. But it was really a lot of experimental stuff to let us do the things like have right-on cockroaches or just like crazy, crazy stupid stuff. But it was a good bit of tech behind making it work, you know.
[00:17:35.490] Kent Bye: And in the actual experience, there's like five or six different scenes. I'd love to step through. So the first scene, we're at Norm's drive-in, which is like this restaurant scene. And there's like a video screen, which I think is interesting because I imagine that there's a lot of aspects of your normal shows, Norm, that you have that have video components. And so there was an integration of some of those videos and other aspects that may be showing on a screen. during a live concert performance, but here we are in VR watching some of that. And then you're able to use the spatial medium of VR to have Christopher Walken start to fly around. And for me, what was really striking was, and again, we're going to start to get into spoilers. If you haven't seen it, I'd highly recommend folks have a chance to see it. But there was this moment when we had like a half hour of just catching up with folks. I thought that was really nice. There was this entering into a ritualistic space of when you go to an event, you kind of have people coming into the space and catching up with each other. And you're not just thrown into it, but you have an opportunity to have these social interactions. And so when it started, the first thing that really started to blow my mind was that people were suddenly trapped in these bubbles and they were like moving around. And there's, I guess, fireballs that were coming down and people were getting struck, but other people were pushing them around. And there were like interactable motorcycles that people are playing around. So there's like these unique VR interactable vehicles and interactions that are being dropped in throughout the course of this experience. And for me, just to see like somebody being trapped inside of a bubble. And I was like, I wonder what they're seeing, because their world is probably getting like all turned around and other people pushing them. And so you have other people interacting with them. And so, yeah, I'd love to hear about that design process of these type of, I guess, unique, interactable moments that are spread throughout this piece.
[00:19:19.367] David McDermott: Yeah, well, we were just playing and having fun. I think at the very first brainstorming session, Norm suggested, imagine the craziest festival you've ever been at and all of the things you might do at a festival. And we were like, that's a good question. Zorb balls, they might be fun, you know, that kind of thing. And, you know, you see all sorts of stuff at the festival and then you think like, what's too dangerous that you wouldn't really want to be doing in real life? Motorbikes. Yeah, that's great. Some motorbikes, you know, so it's just basically like we developed the basic code to be able to do it. And then we're like, what else can we do? Oh, give it a go. Yeah, yeah. And like we're a completely distributed company. So all of the employees meet in VR every morning for a meeting. So you can imagine our morning meetings were just mayhem for this project. Every single morning, like they'd be like, I'd be like, OK, we're planning to do this today. And there's guys zipping around in circles on a motorcycle and someone on it, like in a ball going past like this, you know, like, come on. Come on, focus, guys, you know? But just a lot of fun, a lot of play, really, you know?
[00:20:17.313] Kent Bye: Yeah, Norm, there's other things like eyes that have feet, and they're like jumping up or down, and there's constellation point clouds of people speaking, and you have other elements that are from your normal concert experiences that are tied in there, and I'd love to hear about how you're fusing together your live performance with this VR translation.
[00:20:37.765] Norman Cook: Well, I think one of the biggest problems we had was getting started. We had quite a few meetings where we're like, oh, we could do this. We could do that. We could do this. I'm like, really? You can do that? Yes. Yeah, we could do that. We could do this. We could do anything. But it's like it took a while for us to nail down actually what we were going to do. And so we kind of needed some kind of structure to it where we didn't just go, oh, we could do this. And so the structure that we started really was with my actual show. So I did like a recording of a show. And as you pointed out, I use a lot of visuals on screens during my shows. So I just gave the team an hour long show of mine. with the visuals that went along with it. And then they sometimes ran with what was going on in my visual. If there was an eyeball going in my visual, it's like, well, you've got an eyeball. Your eyeball just goes up and down in the screen. Ours could do way more than that. So some of the stuff like the cockroaches in the motorbikes was there just for fun, but some of it sort of links into the imagery that would be in my show either. But I think it was really just to give us a starting point to actually start laying down going, OK, we'll do that, rather than sitting around going, we can do anything, you know, or how is it all tied together? So I suppose it's good that there is some sort of thread. There's a 40 minute show of mine as a starting point based in reality. That's what you would see if you went to my show. But that's just kind of like the building block for all the rest of it to happen. So lots of it was inspired by stuff that was going on in the screen, you know, that can only happen in 2D. And, you know, and one of the first things we did was film my actual performance in 2D that would be there. But that sort of almost becomes like an afterthought by, you know, that was the beginning of it. And then the VR was augmented by everything else we could put in on top of it or around it.
[00:22:31.064] Kent Bye: Yeah, and I think an adjective that I would use to describe the overall tone of this piece is that there's a lot of psychedelic elements to it where it feels like a psychedelic trip that's mind bending and mind altering and mind expanding. And Norm, I'd love to have you, because this is a trip into your mind, talk a little bit about that psychedelic edge of this mind altering aspect and, you know, what the role of psychedelics has played in your own creative expression.
[00:22:58.975] Norman Cook: Well, I mean, my obsession with The Smiley started from a psychedelic experience. So I suppose that's a leaping point for a lot of the imaginative side of my music or the imagery around it. But I mean, you know, basically what I do is kind of acid house. you know, it's psychedelic music. It's there to try and trip you out a bit, not to expand your mind, but just to free your mind from the shackles of reality. So if you go on the fact that I come from a basis of having psychedelic experiences myself, and that the music and the visuals around it are supposed to be psychedelic, when you go into a world where you can create things that can't exist in the real world, of course, you know, that would be the direction it would take. And then, you know, I mean, most of the imagery in a lot of my stuff is fairly psychedelic anyway, but not in a kind of fractals kind of hippy dippy way, just to kind of, I don't know, wrong. I mean, there's a lot of you can equally say there's quite a lot of movie references in the content of the show. You know, it feels like being in my more favorite weirder movies. You know, we got away with having Krystal Walken and the ghost of Jim Morrison. But, you know, you could have taken it in the way of like the Big Lebowski or something like that. I mean, something like that. If the Coen brothers did VR, I'd like to think that we kind of approximated somewhere the surreal lunacy that they might come up with.
[00:24:23.245] Kent Bye: Yeah, there's like a psychedelic bus.
[00:24:25.486] Norman Cook: I know that. I mean, that's a direct reference to my love of Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters, which has been a very big influence on me. In fact, any of your viewers who don't know who the Merry Pranksters were, Ken Kesey, who wrote One Flew Over the Cookie's Nest, was a voyage to turn the world on to the benefits of LSD for expanding your mind. So he took an old school bus, painted it in psychedelic colors, and famously drove it around America, giving away free acid to people. So that's a direct historic reference. It doesn't get more psychedelic than that, a psychedelic painted bus going around giving away free acid to people.
[00:25:03.452] Kent Bye: Yeah. Cause we're, we're watching this in the parking lot and all of a sudden the first transition is that we're all inside of the psychic dog bus. We're engaged as a platform. You're able to change the scenes and teleport people into one scene to the next. And so to be teleported into this bus, that's very constrained. And then it opens up and there's like this Mad Max scene where, you know, Mad Max fury road and other Mad Max where there's these cars that are going through the desert and And also, you're automatically transitioning people into these different vehicles, and then you have the ability to teleport between them. And so I found that such a trippy moment because I felt like, for one, the music was bringing up all these memories and associations. I was dancing a lot in VR and had this unique, like, Hey, I wonder what this looks like now from this vehicle or from this vehicle. And you can actually move around after you do a remix of like, Hey, it is possible to move around to these different places. And you're connected up to different people in that moment. And so I found that the social dynamics of that really quite interesting, because you know, most times when you go to a physical concert, you don't have the ability to direct people's embodiment into different physical representations and different locations. And so that teleportation nature of this experience was quite strong and allowing me to be transported into like this Mad Max movie, but from these more psychedelic party associations of music and raves. But to be able to see from different perspectives, what the other people were doing from those vehicles, I thought was also quite amazing. And also, I felt like I was starting to go on a journey, whereas the first part was like a traditional like, hey, this is how a concert would normally start. We're all standing around watching and there's a performance and a stage. And now we're getting into the VR journey mode that you could only do in VR and starting to do things that are unique affordances of VR, but also to translate this into more of a psychedelic journey and trip rather than just something where we're static and watching something unfold. We are now embodied in a part of this journey.
[00:27:06.377] Norman Cook: Yeah, I think also the team showed quite a lot of reserve because obviously there are a lot of things you could do that are quite disorientating. But things like the kind of my max bike, so it's kind of just on the nice side of like, oh, I can jump from one to another and we're traveling at great speed. But there's so many kind of VR vertigo moments where you can do things for people that the floor goes away and everyone goes, whoa. And there was, I mean, I think there's the rollercoaster bit around my brain. At one point they did warn me, they said, you know, hang on, it can make some people feel a bit queasy. But I like the fact that we didn't push it too far. Like you said, it was just on that sort of slightly trippy, dreamy sort of looking at different people from different points of view, rather than making it a proper like kind of rollercoaster ride of all the things you could do in a virtual world. The only one I couldn't do, I couldn't get on the motorbike. I just couldn't do it. Did you try the motorbike?
[00:27:56.144] Kent Bye: Yeah. Yeah. And I think the, for me, the controls were a little unorthodox. The VR headset I have is on a index. And so the grip buttons are using the pad on my thumb. And so it took me a while to figure out how to use, I had to be instructed how to use it. And so it wasn't intuitive and it was super fast. And For me, when I'm in an experience in VR like that, that may be causing different aspects of motion sickness, I'll slightly close my eyes to prevent the vexation from happening. And so, yeah, when there was a moment in this piece, also when I was on the roller coaster, like 10 years ago, that would have made me super sick, but I've had enough VR where I've accommodated enough.
[00:28:35.766] Norman Cook: I couldn't even start the motorbike up. As soon as I sat on it, I was getting some kind of loss of balance, leading very quickly to sort of nausea.
[00:28:44.051] David McDermott: It's just like, get real with this thing. Yeah, we did have to be very careful because it is a balance and we have to choose very carefully where we took control and move the audience. And all of the ride on vehicles, the interactable vehicles are completely optional. So the nice thing is if you're a beginner, you probably wouldn't even realize they were there. Whereas if you've got your VR legs, you're already well into the scene. You would go, hang on, that looks like something like getting a ride on, you know? And it's a really, really interesting thing because before I worked in a lot of cinematics. So you get to frame the shot, you know, you get to compose the image of that and you completely lose that in VR. You don't have that control. So, I mean, we had to think about different ways. How do you catch people's attention? How do you draw someone's attention in when they're totally free to look wherever they like? So that's when we try and overlap our animated particles coming down to draw your attention into the screen for the beginning of the show and things like that. But again, as I said, you have to balance taking control of people to move them to a spot to have a good vantage for a highlight, but not taking away people's agency to explore and enjoy for themselves. So hopefully we got the balance right.
[00:29:49.460] Kent Bye: Yeah, I think having those different types of interactable moments, like as we go from the first scene of the drive-in into the second scene with the cars and you're able to move around, but then the third scene we're in this, it's kind of like a rollercoaster amusement park, but also like there's a giant record player where there's like a... That's what the interior of my brain looks like.
[00:30:11.330] Norman Cook: If you look up, you can see you're behind my eyes. That's actually my brain.
[00:30:17.172] Kent Bye: Oh, OK. So you're inside your brain. And so there's a turntable. There's a roller coaster. You know, there's these smiley faces that you're hitting with a bat. But these different moments, like for me, I like look over to the right and I see all these people on the turntable and they're moving around. I was like, OK, I don't think they're actually walking in a perfect circle. They're probably being locomoted around the turntable. And I was like, I want to feel like what it feels like. to be on a turntable in VR during a concert like this. And so that's an example of like, I wouldn't have like discovered that you can stand on the turntable and move around had there not been like a group of 10 or 15 people. And so there's like a wisdom of the crowd type of dynamic in this piece where, Oh, there's something that's happening over here that I might've missed. I'm going to go check that out and see what that feels like. And
[00:31:01.359] Norman Cook: Those things are great because they were the sort of things that we would discuss and go like, well, you know, does that work? Have we done that right? And you can't really tell until you let people loose in it. Because a lot of it was like, they're like, don't worry, people are more VR savvy than you. They'll be looking for things like this. They'll be looking for the things they can climb on or, you know, and they'll know how it works. Whereas, you know, I was just concentrating on getting from A to B. Like you, I'd see the turntable going, how do I get on that? It's like, okay, right. But there's probably a lot more stuff in there that you didn't find. Because again, I know the team were very interested in making it something that you could do more than once. And if you did it again, and then you could look for other things and then, or your mate would go, oh, did you find the eggs? Or, you know, so hopefully there's more stuff that, you know, there's other layers of it that you didn't get the first time round.
[00:31:50.622] David McDermott: Yeah, nearly every object in there is a reference to something from Norm's catalogue. Like right up behind the stage, what the stage is actually on top, you know, there's all sorts of things. And some of them are puns on the song titles as well. So I'd say the real fans would get it if they'd seen it a few times.
[00:32:10.443] Kent Bye: And so then there is this roller coaster element, which I did have to close my eyes a little bit, but I was able to also feel this in any type of music and other films, there's like a building and releasing of tension. And so I feel like throughout the course of this journey, there's things that are really pushing the edge. You know, you don't start with a roller coaster because you might have people bail out because you make them sick, but in the middle of the piece, you kind of force people into the roller coaster. And that's kind of like the prototypical thing that when the DK one was launched March 29th of 2013. So it was coming up on the 10 year anniversary, the day after I saw the fat boy slam preview. was like the 10-year anniversary in VRChat of the consumer VR as an industry. So we're on a decade into this now. And so when that first launched, a lot of very early demos were on a roller coaster. So maybe subconsciously, that was kind of a nod to the 10-year anniversary of consumer VR itself was to put people into a roller coaster. But I was surprised that my tolerance in VR legs was able to have me tolerate an experience like that. Whereas I think back in the day, especially with the DK1, The persistence wasn't great. And a lot of things with how the Oculus DK1 was made would make people sick just by using it and not even doing anything else, just like moving their head around. So on top of that, to have people move around and locomote, which still makes people sick if you're moving through VR. So yeah, that for me was an interesting choice just because you are pushing the edge, but using it as a way of building this contrast and thrill-seeking type of experience. Yeah, love to hear that because you are pushing the edge for what is comfortable for people in VR, but doing it in a way that is trying to give this overall journey for folks.
[00:33:49.459] David McDermott: Yeah, we actually did have a lot of debates about that. I will point out it's only one minute in a 45 minute show. So if it's really tough for you, it's actually a large car and the car is covered in graffiti. So you can just look down and enjoy the graffiti if it's too much for you. But we did have a lot of debates about that. But it was just a really nice transition from the head into the giant diner. So you end up, you go around the roller coaster and you get coughed out of Norm's virtual mouth and out into the next section. And it was just funny. It was like a really enjoyable idea that grabbed us. So we went, I know we have to, let's do it. Let's do it. You know.
[00:34:27.318] Norman Cook: I'm forgetting, of course, you see that, because every time I went through this, David would always be narrating it for us. See, I always had the benefit of it. And now we're getting coughed out of Norman's mouth and now we're in the diner, you can see. And things would be pointed out and things would be explained. But of course, yeah, to the rest of you, you don't have the beauty of your cheeky little voice going, and then here come the gorillas.
[00:34:52.271] David McDermott: Yeah, well, you know what, actually, when we did like the final presentation for Norm and his team, they were all relatively new to VR. But in the final presentation, I was like, OK, this is going to be the test. If they can get through this and they say, OK, at the end, I think most new people are going to be OK, you know. And at the end, I was like, did you feel OK? Were you all right? And everyone was like, oh no, it's OK, it's fine. I was like, good to go.
[00:35:17.172] Kent Bye: Yeah, I miss that we were in your head and then we were spit out of your mouth. But we are in this miniaturized space where there's these giant humans in the context of the diner. We start off at Norm's diner. And then we kind of go off on this journey, we come back into like a diner scene with some cooking that's going on, there's a milkshake that's like falling over and someone comes over and drinks out of the shake. But for me, the thing that was really striking was just to see people riding around cockroaches and going off ramps and just like flying into people. And so there's a lot of things that are happening at like using the aspect of scale, I think, in this particular scene where you have things at such a giant scale. But because they're giant scale, then you have things that are usually tiny, like a cockroach, and you're able to ride the cockroach just like you would be riding around a motorcycle. So there's this other element of taking a reference point from earlier in the show. If people rode around a bike, then they can also ride around on these cockroaches. And just the surreal nature of seeing people ride around the cockroaches. And it was like this exploration of like, oh, what else can we do? What's going to happen next? And at that point, I think there's probably a lot more cinematics in that scene. where there's things happening in the wider world that you're watching unfold. And you're also just have this sense of awe and wonder for how things are at this giant scale.
[00:36:32.186] Norman Cook: I like the way at that point, all this stuff, the giant stuff seemed to happen in this weird slow motion. And you can imagine if you were one of the little people, that would be how these big people would appear to move like really slowly. Again, cinematic and trippy at the same time.
[00:36:48.256] David McDermott: Yeah, we mo-capped at full speed. So we had the actors in the mo-cap gear at full speed. And then we used that as the basis for the animation. And we slowed it down. We did a 50% slowdown to get that sense of scale in it, you know? So it was good fun. And there's something going on in every single direction. So, I mean, if you were just looking in the one direction, there's more of a story going on behind you and different things. And Norm, of course, is Dex up on top of the giant hamburger, which is kind of a nice image.
[00:37:16.847] Kent Bye: And then after that, I think we go into the skydiving scene, which has a lot of like references from like Dr. Strangelove riding on the bomb. And someone commented, they said, this is the longest I've ever been skydiving. Because usually when you skydive, it's like 50 seconds, a minute or two minutes. But this is like an extended three to four minutes that you're flying down. And again, this is a moment where your virtual body representation, you may be upright, but you're forcing everybody to be like laying down. And I thought like, oh, maybe I should be laying down to kind of match my embodiment. I didn't end up doing that just because I wanted to still be able to look around and everything. My locomotion was a little bit constrained. And that was a moment where we're kind of watching the skydiving dancing that's happening with planes flying around. But that was another moment of how do you recreate a dimension of what it feels to go skydiving. There's actually like these virtual skydiving things where you're in a wind tunnel and you feel the haptic of the wind, which I think is a key component of actually recreating that sense of free fall. But just to be have people flying around, there's a certain amount of how much can you force people into these embodiments and give them the feeling that they're in this epic dance that's happening in the sky. So I felt like there's an element of that, that even though I didn't feel like I was actually skydiving, It felt like there was a group dynamic of like, hey, that would be something that would likely not happen in VR.
[00:38:37.964] Norman Cook: I think you're right. I was always tempted to lie flat down on the floor during that scene.
[00:38:43.064] Kent Bye: You would actually do that, Norm? You would actually lay down on the floor at that point?
[00:38:45.967] Norman Cook: I was tempted to do it. I didn't want to make a fool of myself in front of while we're, you know, we're having a business meeting here and they're like, where's Norm gone? Also my, like I said, I'm still a beginner in VR and that, you know, the sort of the objects around me sometimes can be slightly dangerous. if I suddenly decided to face plant into my own desk like that. But yeah, no, you're right that, cause that was one where your POV doesn't match quite because you're forced to look down, but your body is still up, if you see what I mean. We should work on something that forces you onto the floor at that point. Some way of- Terrifying. You know, like the only way you can maintain your balance is to lie flat down on the floor. You see, I have to be careful what I joke about with this lot, because, you know, we would make jokes and they would make them come true. I'm gently daring you there.
[00:39:40.398] David McDermott: Yeah, we'll see what we can do. When we get this final connection there for everyone with their VR headsets, I'm sure we'll be able to do that. But there was quite a lot of fine tuning in that. The first version of the skydiving we had, it had a whole lot of tilt in it as you were moving around. And that was really too much. So it's a stylized experience, you know, like as much fun as possible without disturbing your enjoyment of the music and the set, but still giving you enough control to be able to feel like you're really controlling what you're doing, you know.
[00:40:09.148] Norman Cook: I thought you toned back this because I remember the first time we did the skydiving, I was like, whoa. Yeah. It became a bit more doable. All right. So you backed it off just to save people's stomachs.
[00:40:21.195] David McDermott: Yeah. The worst is when you do like a tilt like this and that just completely messes with your balance. So we're just like, no, that's too cruel.
[00:40:28.579] Kent Bye: We'll bring it back a bit. Yeah, I noticed I couldn't really look them out around. There were some people that are moving around. I was like, how are they moving? And I don't know if you were you constraining people's movements and have something because there were some people moving around. I don't know if that was a cameraman or something.
[00:40:41.660] David McDermott: No, you're completely free to move. What happened is, you see, we're able to remap the controls dynamically in the scene. So the usual locomotion controls on the platform were completely replaced. So it was your two thumbsticks. The right thumbstick would make you spin in a clockwise, anticlockwise motion, and then the left thumbstick would bring you forward and back. So, I mean, we don't explain that, and that's kind of intentional because, like I said, people with experience and pros will do it, and they would be the ones most likely to be fine. new users just can stay put and enjoy the visuals. So I mean, it works out best either way.
[00:41:15.922] Kent Bye: Okay. Yeah, that makes sense. And so I guess after that point, I think that we go into the final scene, which is the Mount Ravemore, which you have folks in a sort of the Mount Rushmore in the United States. So we're in the forest scene, there's some Bigfoot characters, and I guess gorillas that you can jump onto and ride around, which was a lot of fun. Again, another vehicle element in the gorillas are dancing and we're kind of in the culmination of the overall journey that we've been going on. And so there's both a climax and a winding down of the piece overall. But yeah, I'd love to hear about the design inspiration for that, because there's a lot of components that are coming in with emojis that are flying around. And it feels like there's this starting in like alt space and VR chat, people sending out emojis. And I'm not sure if this is integrated into Engage, but there's a challenge of like, how do people express different dimensions of their feelings or their thoughts? And so we've had with starting with alt space, the ability to send these spatialized emojis out into the world. But these are like giant emojis. And there's something about the lo-fi nature of something like an emoji, but blown up in scale, but also like flying around, but also a lot of it. in this scene where like alien ships that are coming down and lots of things that are surprising that are happening throughout the course of this. But I'd love to hear about the overall juxtaposition of all these things that are coming down for this Mount Ravemore scene that you have at the end here.
[00:42:39.756] David McDermott: Well, really a lot of the inspiration for the different things we did came from exploring the characters that are already there in the visual canon of all the videos and stuff like that. So it was kind of exploring what happens if we take Fat Kid and put him in this situation or what happens when we put him in this situation. And I think there was one key visual that Norm pointed out of an alternative Mount Rushmore that we'd seen. And that inspired the idea of Mount Ravemore. So again, they were trying to embellish and build on it. And we're like, well, okay, what would the world be like if the venerated personages were these musicians and creators and things like that? And who would we have up there? You know, there was great debates in the There was lots of different versions of it in the storyboard before we got the final set of people were on there. And then we decided to go the whole hog. So we made like a nice branded signs for the National Park. And there's actually instructions on the Bigfoot Wildlife Reserve and not to abuse the wildlife and things like that, which obviously everyone ignores and rides around on their shoulders. And yeah, and then it was just by bringing those kind of playful elements into it. And really, it's kind of like this area would be the closest one that's close to like an outdoor gig or an illegal rave or something, you know, somewhere in the wilderness with big sound system set up and everything like that. So, yeah, I was trying to build an atmosphere, really.
[00:43:59.386] Norman Cook: Build an atmosphere, but also build a climax, because in cinematic terms, there isn't really an ending because there isn't really a linear narrative. So there isn't really a story that you can tie up and go, well, that's a happy ending for, you know, the fat kid gets married to the girl out of the diner or anything like that. But on some of the earlier versions, I was like, it needs to be more of a crescendo. And I remember them saying, you know, at the end of the gig, what would happen? I was like, well, you know, we'd have the fireworks and the sparklers and, you know, that perfect gig at the end of it, I would just blow everything up. So they're like, OK, right. So we have an explosion. And I mean, that was the sort of extent of the narrative. But for me, every show, you want it to end with a big bang and a big bang, but also beauty. You know, there'll be the bang, but the confetti or the fireworks or whatever. And the idea was, yeah, just to have a kind of finale. It's like that's kind of the last scene in a film and they're all having the party and, you know, everybody's happy. And then they sort of, you know, zooms out. It's the happy ever after.
[00:45:03.511] Kent Bye: Yeah. Norm, I wanted to ask you about the integration of this Greta Thunberg speech that she's giving, because she says in that speech right here, right now, and then you're like remixing your song into that. What was really interesting for me is that I'm taking on this psychedelic journey. It's more of an escapist one. And for me, my experience in that moment was I was actually really grounded back into the reality of what's happening in the world. And just listening to her give that speech actually was really emotionally moving for me. It felt like, hey, we've been on this escapist journey, but now things are getting real. So yeah, I'd love to hear your integration of that speech from Greta and integration into what happens after that.
[00:45:45.027] Norman Cook: Well, I don't think it was intentional to sort of bring you back to reality after being in fantasy. I think it was just more for me. I mean, that sort of arose from her saying right here, right now, during her speech to the United Nations, someone flagged that up to me on social media. And so we're sort of experimenting with incorporating that into the tune. And then when we took the visual of her and then blacked out the background, it just started looking like something out of a dream. And she's got such a powerfully expressive face the way she says it. And so I just incorporated it into my shows. And again, it's kind of normally comes at the climax of the show, but it's something that it's about bringing people together. It's not about shocking you back into reality. It's about saying, well, here's a message that pretty much 98% of my audience would completely wholeheartedly agree with the fact that we have to save the world that we live in. So it's that one little chink of reality, but it was supposed to be kind of reaffirming how we feel about each other. And yeah, but the most powerful thing about it, you know, apart from the actual words she said, is just her delivery of it. She always reminds me of Johnny Rotten, John Lydon, when he was spitting into the camera abuse and, you know, this kind of when I was a kid, punk rock was, was what turned me on. And there's that kind of just the passion in her face. And she reminded me of him. But it's just, it's just a, if there's any message in my music, aside from let's escape reality, and there'll be any message, it would be, we need to save our planet. And we need to start listening to people like Greta Thunberg. So it's a, yeah, it's a moment about it. But I think Like I said, the nature of how her face sits into it and the nature of how her voice is edited into the music is kind of ethereal, but a reminder of the real world we live in.
[00:47:44.667] Kent Bye: Yeah, like I said, for me, it was like an emotional turn that was more grounding into what was happening. And I was really emotionally moved. And then there's like a giant atom bomb explosion. I feel like there was something about the juxtaposition of that that there was a bit of a dissonance for me. Because there is this escape the psychedelic journey. We're talking about the reality of what's happening. She's talking about climate change and how we're destroying our planet. And then there is like a nuclear explosion. And then the reaction of the crowd was just sort of like, hey, this is an amazing spectacle. It's almost like fireworks going off. And I felt like there was this weird, disjunctive experience I had at that moment, which was like, hey, wait a minute, we're kind of like talking about something serious that we're doing unconsciously, but we're also dealing with the threats of nuclear annihilation. So I felt like in that moment, it was something that was like, hey, this is a spectacle, and it's really amazing. to see, but at the same time, the deeper symbolic references to that.
[00:48:36.790] Norman Cook: It's surreal juxtaposition in the same way as me riding on the bomb a la Doctor Strangelove. I mean, Doctor Strangelove is a very surreal and funny film about a very, very serious topic. And I suppose it's that kind of using the surreal to get a point across. It makes you think, you know, on the one hand, are we here to save the planet or are there people who really actually want to blow it up? You know, if it gets you thinking, then that's kind of interesting, surreal, rather than just pointless, funny, surreal.
[00:49:09.802] David McDermott: And it was actually interesting.
[00:49:11.143] Norman Cook: Some attack of some strange attempt to have some kind of resonance. Yes, some kind of resonance with the reality of the world we live in. Not that deep, though. Not hugely deep. But I mean, I'll take the fact that there, because for me, I think that it does become quite an emotional moment in there. And I think it's a nice crescendo. And you're right. At the one time, you've got the togetherness of us all uniting behind Greta's message. And at the other, you've got the people cheering at the abject horror of nuclear war.
[00:49:47.777] David McDermott: before the explosion, we had all the kind of early life swimming around and everything like that. But once the explosion's gone, it's all gone. All the life is gone after that. And I was surprised that by testing this with audiences, there was quite an emotional reaction. And I was quite surprised. And yeah, it makes you think absolutely makes you think, you know.
[00:50:09.113] Kent Bye: Yeah, I would have liked to have seen some of the environments that's there, if there is an actual nuclear explosion, if that's impacting the environment. But because it was not impacting the environment immediately, it was sort of like an imaginal vision of something that was not actually physically happening where we're at. But I feel like after the winding down of the music, we go back into Norm's diner parking lot where we began this whole journey. And there was like this just sense-making process that people were just like talking about this journey of wonder and awe and this journey to Norm's mind, which was quite a surrealistic twist of nostalgia and things that we had never seen and these interactions. And I think overall, it was like, I've seen a number of different VR concert experiences, but this is the first that felt groundbreaking in ways that it's integrating all of these different elements and taking people onto this journey. And the social dimension, I think, is also worth pointing out, where a lot of times you don't rely upon other people doing anything because you're on your own exploratory journey. But this one in particular had a deep integration for how people were interacting throughout the course of this piece, which I feel like was another element of what was very unique about it all.
[00:51:15.702] Norman Cook: You do know this is all complete music to our ears, what you're saying, because we spent a year and a half trying to get this to work. And it's almost like, you know, the script we wrote, we wanted you to say you're just saying word for word, because we did want that social interaction. We did want the, you know, and yeah, it's music to our ears because we didn't really know exactly what we were doing. We knew what we were trying to do. But until people experience it, you don't, you know, you can, you know, by the end of it, I'd been through the story so many times. It's like, it sort of didn't have that impact anymore. So to hear, especially you who knows something about, and has experienced those things before, to hear you pick up on all the different levels of it that we were trying to express is, like I said, music to my ears. Thank you.
[00:52:04.472] David McDermott: Yeah, delighted to hear that as well. And being present, like I was there present at a lot of the shows we did. And we only finished just like six o'clock this morning, seeing people at the end of the show actually going up and hugging each other and stuff. It was amazing. And people were going for it. They were seriously, like really shaking their stuff. I was like, there's got to be broken lampshades across the world now, you know? And it's just wonderful. And that's what really like it really makes it fun and worthwhile seeing people like on Twitter just then with their VR headsets go dancing around stupid. You know, it's brilliant. It's a lot of fun and really it seems people are enjoying it, which is wonderful. So I'm delighted.
[00:52:46.831] Kent Bye: Yeah, and for me, it was a callback to, like, there's a fusion of the songs that I listened to, like I had the album that I was playing over and over again, just on repeat whenever I was in my car in that era. And so there's an element of like, being taken back to that moment, but also being able to like dance in VR, to be with my contemporary friends in virtual reality, and to be taken on a psychedelic trip. It was like this combination of all these things that I thought was, I mean, not everybody is going to respond to music in the same way and have the same associations, because there's been a lot of VR concert experiences, that I've gone to and there's been some really amazing stuff that I've seen, especially Jean-Michel Jarre and the stuff that he's been working on. But I don't have that same association with the music itself. For me, it was like this ultimate rave experience that took me on this whole journey. There's that element of just being able to dance and just cut loose. Like you said, Norm, be able to be taken and allow us to explore these new dimensions of really having this static state of being your body and just cutting loose. And this altered state of consciousness in a way, even though I wasn't taking any psychedelics, it felt like a psychedelic trip at the end of it.
[00:53:50.639] Norman Cook: But again, you know, the fact that you went on any kind of trip when you're supposed to be working, you're supposed to be wandering around, thinking, oh, that's wrong, that's effective. You know, the fact that you got involved means that Engage have done their job of, you know, drawing you into the world. Rather, you know, it's impossible just to be an observer in that world.
[00:54:11.462] Kent Bye: Yeah, and I guess as we start to wrap up, I'd be curious to hear from each of you what you think the ultimate potential of virtual reality and the intersection with music might be and what it might be able to enable.
[00:54:23.967] David McDermott: Well, this has proven that there is a different way to tackle it. And my CEO, Dave Whelan, always says there's no point in slavishly trying to recreate reality. That's not the point. We've got these tools. We've got this potential. It's an incredible creative canvas. And instead of looking at the limitations, like you're not able to set up a shot like a movie or something, there's so much more you can do. And I think we really just started exploring that. So I'm really excited about the potential of this. And I look forward to doing more music projects and this kind of collaboration. It's probably one of the most enjoyable projects I've ever got to work on. So really fantastic. And I just want to say thanks very much for being able to do it. And the opportunity to take part of it was great.
[00:55:08.291] Norman Cook: From my point of view, I've really enjoyed the way that you can make your music come alive. You know, again, going back to Spike Jonze, you know, I'd been making videos for years and never particularly, there was a few, every now and then there'd be one that you're proud of or you think, oh, I look good in that one. But Spike sort of, every time I hear Praise You, I think of Spike's video. And I suppose it's the same as how music works in movies, you know, when there's a great scene, you know, you always, remember the music and associate that with the scene. And for VR to take that kind of visualising music further than a pop promo can do, or further than a little viral can do, I think is very exciting. A lot of those tunes in there I've been listening to for 20 years and then they've now got new life and they've got this spatial aspect that they didn't have before. So I'm really looking forward to, not just from my point of view or from Engage's point of view, but from the world's point of view, that this might be some kind of tipping point where VR can take, yeah, in the way that the whole world of music changed when we started doing pop videos. Because before you just, you know, maybe had a picture sleeve with a picture of the band on the front and that was your only visualization of the record. When people started using two-dimensional video to explain or augment the music, it took it further and they could tell their story better. This takes it to another level where you can become immersed in the story as well as seeing it. And there are boundaries, but there's very fewer boundaries than there are in real life. And so it'd be interesting to see where we all go with that. And I think Engage has really kicked off, it seems, I was very interested in hearing you know, we had two sets of reviews over the last few days. One is from The Times and The Telegraph and The Sun, and the other is from The Meta World. And I was really interested in whether they, you know, one was really sniffy about it and one, you know, but it seems to have turned on both sides. So I'm really glad that there's kind of bringing the music biz world into The Meta World. And here's to continuing exploration of what we can do together. I've had so much fun doing it and the creative process has been great and I'm very, very, very proud and very, very thankful of everything that the whole Engage team has done. And not just because we had a lot of fun doing it, but I do think we've created something quite exciting and different and dare I say it, groundbreaking.
[00:57:41.620] Kent Bye: Yeah, I definitely do agree that there is as a VR journalist and covering the space, it is got a number of different groundbreaking elements that is doing something that is in the spirit of the lineage of your prior work with Spike Jones. And, you know, this kind of surrealistic, iconic videos that I think this is a similarly, but in more of the VR space, using and exploring the different affordances. And David, I want to ask one quick technical follow-up question, because I saw this in a PC VR experience on my index, but I also saw people in the quest. Is there a difference between the experiences that people saw if they were in PC VR versus whether they were in the quest?
[00:58:19.936] David McDermott: It's exactly the same experience. And that's really important part about Engage. Like the spirit of Engage is everyone's welcome. You know, we want everyone to be able to join in and join the space, no matter like if you've got the super high end PCB or with the latest cards, or if you're coming in on a decent enough tablet, you know, we want everyone to be able to join no matter what. And I think it worked really well on this one. But it was really restricting. We had to heavily optimize it and we had to build a lot of extra functionality to be able to load and unload assets as we go. So there was a lot of work that went in to try and make it look seamless, but it was exactly the same experience for everyone. I'm really glad because I hate when you go to something, you know, like back in the old days of computers, you'd look at the computer game box and it's got the beautiful graphics from another system. And then you bring it home to your home computer and it's rubbish. You know, I didn't want that. We want everyone to have the same level of fun and experience there. So that was, Really glad that worked in.
[00:59:20.836] Kent Bye: Yeah. I'm glad I got clarification on that. Cause there's a whole other level of innovation and groundbreaking stuff that even pull that off to have the high level of fidelity experience of someone who's in a PC VR versus someone who's in a quest and have that parity between those two. I think that's not an easy task to be able to do that given all the different constraints. And so, yeah, to have everybody in that same space and to have essentially the same experience. Cause you, you risk sometimes having like a bifurcated experience of something like VR chat, where. you may have a lower resolution of different stuff. But to have everybody on the same page, seeing and experiencing the same stuff, yeah, really just quite innovative and groundbreaking. And yeah, I guess, is there any other thing that's left unsaid that you'd like to say to the broader immersive community?
[01:00:03.424] Norman Cook: I'm assuming that most of your viewers or readers will possess a VR headset. If and when we repeat this experience, please, please, everyone with a VR headset, please offer your VR headset for that night. to someone who hasn't got it. Because there's so many people. One thing we have realized from the uptake is that only about half of 1% of my fans have access to a VR headset. So share the love. Share the love. Spread the word. And if it does come on again, rather than doing it yourself, offer it to a friend. Offer it to a friend who doesn't have a headset.
[01:00:38.851] David McDermott: And I'd like to say that the atmosphere was absolutely amazing. The crossover between Fatboy Slim fans and VR enthusiasts, there was not one single bit of trolling. Everyone was totally into the gig and it was just such an amazing atmosphere. So I actually went to the four of the shows. You'd think I would have had enough of it, but I went to the four of the shows. I was in there and I was in there dancing with the people. So it was, yeah, one of the best projects ever. It's great.
[01:01:05.139] Kent Bye: Awesome. And what was the capacity for each of the sessions? Was it around 80 or 100, or how many people could you have in there?
[01:01:10.746] David McDermott: Yeah, so each single session had 60 people. And then we have an automatic server-side system that spins up rooms as they're necessary, and they keep them all synchronized as well. So we make sure that everyone's getting the same experience at the same time. So yeah, that's how the system works.
[01:01:25.862] Kent Bye: Awesome. Well, David and Norm, thanks so much for coming on to the podcast and helping to break down your creative process and this experience. And like I said, it was one of the most mind bending, groundbreaking VR concert experiences that I've seen that was tapping into a lot of deeply personal nostalgia and memories, but also just one of the most banger rave experiences I've had in VR that was taking me on a whole journey into Norm's mind. So I really appreciated the opportunity to not only experience it, but be able to also break it down with both of you today. So thanks again
[01:01:56.692] David McDermott: Cool. Well, thanks for talking to us. Thanks very much. It's lovely to talk to you.
[01:02:01.133] Kent Bye: So that was David McDermott. He's the head of studio at EngageXR, and he's been working on creating content, events, and a lot of other interactive VR projects, as well as Norman Cook. He's professionally known as FatboySlim. He's a DJ, producer, and has recently entered into the magical world of VR with this event slash project slash experiment called FatboySlim's Eat, Sleep, VR, Repeat, an immersive VR metaverse concert. So a number of takeaways about this interview is that, first of all, Well just to hear the creative process that they went through of not only trying to figure out whatever the most imaginative or creative or stupid idea that anybody wanted to try to experience and to create this juxtaposition of not only creating this psychedelic journey that is trying to be a little bit mind bending and trying to blur the different dimensions of reality, do things that you can't do in physical reality, like be a micro scale on a table and see these giant motion captured folks walking around in slow motion and to have all these different types of vehicles from motorcycles to cockroaches to gorillas as you're walking around on their shoulders and there's dances. And just the whole thread of the music is going back from the 25 year anniversary of Fat Boy Slim's album of you've come a long way baby. So a lot of these classic tracks that a lot of people are familiar with and as people are in this immersive experience, they're dancing around and then they have all these different interactable components that are hidden or embedded into the environment. And so it's a bit of this experience of going through and seeing what other people are discovering because it's just so much and so overwhelming that, you know, if you're just going through this experience by yourself, you may miss a lot of those types of interactive components. Part of the fun was this discovery process that other people were going around and riding around the cockroaches and going off ramps and flying into people and just these really surreal moments and even the first one that I remember is going from just being in the parking lot having the psychedelic bus from you know, Ken Kesey's and Mary pranksters further bus, which is this psychedelically painted bus that everybody gets automatically transported into so you're in this open space you get into the constrained space and then all of a sudden you get put into this wide open desert and everybody is randomly assigned to different vehicles and I think they had a little bit of a random shifting of which vehicle you're in and so there's this kind of beat where you'd be suddenly mixed up with different people in like a bus with a disco ball and you're dancing around or another like yacht and just a bunch of really surrealistic vehicles that were going through the desert kind of in this Mad Max vein as you're moving around but you could also teleport around and so it gave you this agency to move around and so That's what I mean is that throughout the course of this experience you had this exploratory aspect where you could see what was happening within the context of each of these environments but there's also a social dimension of people discovering different things that you could do or interact with and whether it's like taking these bats and hitting these smiley faces or standing on a turntable as you're moving around or people being immersed into these zorb balls that you're can get pushed around and so yeah and you know it kind of culminates into this Mount Ravemore scene where you're in the forest and it's a little bit more open you see these prominent figures from the rave scene embedded into what would be the equivalent of Mount Rushmore but this is Mount Ravemore You have UFOs and emojis being sent out, and it actually takes this tonal shift, for me at least, at that moment, where for Norman, he was trying to create this bringing people together in a theme that they could really agree with. It was right here, right now, as I was playing, and Greta Thunberg. Integrated that right here right now into one of her speeches at the United Nations And so that plays and that sort of put me into this really deeply emotionally connected space and then there's a big giant Nuclear explosion and so she's speaking about the end of the world and then you see this nuclear explosion But it's in this more imaginal space because you see all the life that was around you is no longer there but it's not actually like reflected into the virtual space that you're there so it was more of like a dreamlike vision that Norman was saying, they're creating this surrealistic juxtaposition that has this irreverent taste. But for me, that tonal shift between all those things just was a little bit more of a disjunctive experience. It was really quite a visually alluring climax and pinnacle. And as I watched the 2D version of a concert, then I could kind of see that trying to end with a bang metaphorically. So we go back into the parking lot and there was a lot of just people able to unpack and share their experiences for this wild experience that everybody had just gone through. And I think for me, part of what was making it so much of a more meaningful experience was it just happened to be a lot of people that I knew from the VR industry. So it was bringing together a lot of folks that I've interviewed, people that I know, people I catch up with when I go to these different types of physical events. And so it felt like one of these shared experiences that we were all able to go through. just to see the different personalities of different people who were tinkering and playing around with different things as well throughout the course of the experience. So there's another element of that, which is the whole social dimension that, depending on whether or not you're able to see it with a bunch of people that you happen to know, made it a much more meaningful experience for me personally. Plus, I had a lot of personal connection to the music that I've been listening to for over 20 plus years. So it also was this nostalgia of taking me back to a certain moment in time and just allowed me to get up and dance in a way that allowed me to get into a bit of this altered state of consciousness and this euphoric, mind-bending, awe-inspiring, and really groundbreaking experience, especially as I hear more about what Engage has been able to do with creating this system across all of these different platforms. to be able to do all the loading in the backend, to have like 60 people in these different instances. I mean, that's quite a lot of technological breakthroughs that they've been able to do in order to have this Quest-based experience that can go both from the Quest into PC VR. And then I wasn't sure if they have launched any of the web components, if people could just watch it on their phone or whatnot, but that's certainly been something that's been in their pipeline as well. So technologically, it's amazing. And the whole creative vision, what they were able to do was really inspiring as well. And I just love to hear a little bit more about their creative process of taking a baseline of what Norman was able to do in his concert experiences, and start from there, and then take these associative links and Start to do some of these translations of what they see in 2d into these more 3d representations But also to not be bounded by anything that's constrained to this 2d medium of video but to break out of that constraint and to Really start to push the limits of what could be done with all the different immersive components. And so I Yeah, I felt like overall the whole 45-minute experience was quite an epic journey and not only aesthetically pleasing and amazing and mind-bending and awe-inspiring, but a lot of these other really impressive technological breakthroughs and innovations as well. Hopefully they'll bring it back at some point again. Check the show notes to see what the latest information is I'll put a link to where the original link to eat sleep VR repeat immersive metaverse concert was and maybe they'll update that page or You can keep an eye on for when it's gonna come back. I imagine it's gonna come back at some point I know the Venice Film Festival actually ends up bringing a lot of performances and so maybe they'll end up there or maybe they'll have another concert at some point so Yeah, keep an eye out for this Fatboy Slim concert in Engage XR and certainly go check out what's happening in Engage XR because there's a lot of really interesting stuff that's happening there as well. I'm actually going to be going out to the Augmented World Expo. I'll be there giving a talk about AI ethics on a panel discussion there on Wednesday, 2.30 PM on the main stage. And yeah, I look forward to also seeing more people. I'm actually going to be going out to Tribeca the week after. Apple is going to be potentially announcing something really big coming up here on June 5th. So I hope to chat with some folks that were either at that event or to get a little bit more information what's happening there. And we'll have a sneak preview coming up of Tribeca Immersive coming up next week before I head off to Tribeca. And then after Tribeca, there's actually another event called XR Access. It's an accessibility conference that's happening there in New York City on June 15th and 16th. So keep an eye out on that. You can attend. either virtually or if you're in the New York City, go check out and meet all these folks that are thinking about all these really important aspects that need to be figured out still with accessibility within XR. So that's all that I have for today, and I just wanted to thank you for listening to the Voices of VR podcast. And if you enjoy the podcast, then please do spread the word, tell your friends, and consider becoming a member of the Patreon. This is a listener-supported podcast, and so I do rely upon donations from people like yourself in order to continue bringing this coverage. So you can become a member and donate today at patreon.com slash voicesofvr. Thanks for listening.
