Eindhoven pop venue Effenaar has launched a new concert experience: HYMNE. This project combines live performances with augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR). The goal is to give visitors different experiences and offer more freedom to artists. “This is really cool.”
With the Belgian band WITT, you lie in a hammock, wearing a VR headset. While the band performs in the hall and moves through the audience, you look up. “The performance uses augmented reality. That is a layer that lies over reality,” explains Jos Feijen, director of Effenaar. “And in the world above you, all sorts of things are happening. People are walking around in the hall and crawling on the ceiling. You start to wonder what is real and what is not.”
Cooperation
WITT is one of the four artists in the line-up of HYMNE. Dylan van Dael, CHARLOT and Anneke van Giersbergen complete the line-up. They are accompanied by guitarist Steve Vai. The project is a collaboration between the Effenaar and Eindhoven-based 4DR Studios, the only 4D studio in the Netherlands and one of the few in the world. The idea for Hymne came from director Natasja Paulissen. “It’s really cool to participate in something that you’ve had in mind for so many years,” she says. This is possible thanks to the subsidy from the third partner of the project: CORTEX2. A European-subsidised initiative that focuses on improving Extended Reality. 4DR Studios asked the Effenaar to participate in the project. “Because the Effenaar has been working on innovation for so long,” Paulissen explains.
VR and AR
“We want to investigate how you can use new technology to give visitors completely different experiences and more freedom to artists,” says Feijen. The band CHARLOT and singer Anneke van Giersbergen use VR. They take you along with the song they have made. With Van Giersbergen, for example, you start on an island, and the atmosphere is different at every spot on the island, with the music changing with the atmosphere.
“We’ve been working with VR and AR for 15 years now, and we know that music is very important in that, because otherwise it becomes bland,” says Paulssen. “But now we work the other way around. We start with the music, and then we make VR or AR for that,” she explains.
Virtual world
The artists were given the freedom to give substance to their song. They made a mood board, thought about what inspired them and started thinking about which scenes fit a song. Then the people with the expertise of XR come in, who look at how they can bring that experience to life. “What would they want to perform in a virtual world, how would you do that? For an artist it is very important that they can convey the feeling of a song,” says Paulissen.
“Artists and musicians are given a new way to tell a story. This is all still in its infancy, but if you look at how teenagers deal with the digital world, it ties in with what they are already doing. A new way to express yourself, that suits today’s youth,” Feijen adds.
Brought
There was a try-out recently. “People are really into it for the whole song, they are out of this world for half an hour on music they have never heard before,” says Paulssen. “It is not without reason that the video clip became so popular. This is actually the continuation of the video clip.”
The try-out also presented some challenges. “It is technically challenging. Holograms are heavy files. We had to figure out how to control multiple glasses and how to take the audience with us,” Feijnen explains. For now, these are small concerts, with a small audience. But who knows what the future will bring. “We are the first in the Netherlands to be able to do this. We have been doing this for a long time, and as a city we can be proud of that. Now you still need VR glasses for that, but soon it will become more normal and you might even be able to do augmented reality with normal glasses.”
HYMNE will premiere on June 25.
Source: Studio040
For Eindhoven News: Lila Mehrez
