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Adding a New Dimension to Music in XR, with Goldenvoice’s Sam Schoonover
Alan puts it best in this episode of XR for Business: Sam Schoonover’s job with Goldenvoice is to create “wow” moments at music festivals like Coachella. Sam talks about the groundwork they’ve laid at Coachella for immersive reality so far, and where he plans to take it going forward.
Alan: Coming up next on the XR
for Business Podcast, we have Sam Schoon over from Goldenvoice and
Coachella, my favorite music festival in the world. We’re going to be
talking about augmented reality spaceships, augmented reality
portals, bringing video to life in a AR and El Pollo Loco. All that
and more coming up next on the XR for Business Podcast.
Sam, welcome to the show.
Sam: Hi. Thanks for having me.
Alan: It’s my absolute pleasure,
man. As you know — and as people on the show who know because I’ve
mentioned it before — Coachella is one of my absolute favorite music
festivals. And having been a deejay for 20 years myself, I’ve been to
a few. Coachella is just this magical place. So I’m really excited to
unlock two of my favorite things — music festivals and XR — with
you on the show. So, thank you so much.
Sam: Yeah, absolutely. Me as
well. I think a lot of people out there would agree with you.
Alan: Yeah, man. So tell me, how
did you end up working with Coachella and what have you done before
and how did you get there? Let’s just get into it.
Sam: Previous to this job, I was
doing a whole assortment of different things in the music industry,
and I guess the technology industry as well. I was a freelance
website developer, and had also been curating music and had developed
a playlist curation application. And then alongside that, I was
promoting with various promoters in San Diego and Los Angeles and
touring shows. And that eventually — that and a music blog and I was
doing at the time — introduced me to the guy who started Splash
House, which is a smaller music festival in Palm Springs. And through
him, I met the Goldenvoice team and I got involved at Goldenvoice
Digital, and in a roundabout way, ended up focusing entirely on
innovation just for Coachella.
Alan: What a dream job for
somebody like… “here, your job is to focus on innovation, make
really cool things that nobody’s done in the world, for the most
impressive festivals in the world.”
Sam: Yeah, sure. I mean, it’s a
lot of fun. It’s fun to be able to focus on new things every day. And
we have like just such an incredible team at Goldenvoice, the people
who have been doing Coachella for the past 20 years are still
involved and still loving it. And they’re really the reason why this
job even exists, because they appreciate innovation and they
understand its place and our future. And and they understand that
innovating and experimenting and sometimes failing, but always trying
is a part of what makes things great and stand the test of time.
Coachella is in a unique situation, where it’s a successful music
festival and it’s a successful business, so we have the ability to
spend money on experiences like that, while not every festival out
there is so lucky.
Alan: Yeah. And you guys —
well, “you guys,” I think it was before you even got there
— but Coachella is no stranger to virtual and augmented reality. I
remember in, oh man, it must be 2015/16, Coachella livestreamed 360
content to VR headsets and I believe it was pushing to the — it was!
— it was the Samsung GearyVR at the time. I remember watching one of
one of the shows from there and thinking, “oh man, I’m literally
like getting crazy FOMO.”
Sam: Yeah, you’re right. It was
kind of our first foray actually into, like, I guess what we would
call the VR industry. I think as a lot of us have learned, those 360
music streaming experiences aren’t super compelling. And I just think
the live music experience is so incredible that they haven’t come
close to replicating that quite yet. But nonetheless, there was a lot
of great learnings. I think it was really fun and also important to
us from a branding perspective to be amongst the first live events
even doing something like that. And it was also a fun addition to the
YouTube livestream, which is a really important experience for us and
the fans.
Alan: I think there is a value
to this. Still, the first experience I ever saw in VR was the Beck
concert by Chris Milk. And I think people did the 360 video and then
they kind of got away from it, but I think it still has value in the
fact that being able to be in places where you can’t go — you can’t
stand next to the artist onstage at Coachella, you can’t be on stage,
you can’t fly over the crowd — there’s certain things like that
where I think there’s still gonna be a value in capturing that
content. And I think the next thing would be how do we capture it
volumetrically? But it’s crazy. But another thing that in 2016, 2017,
you guys did an AR [experience], The Box. For anyone who doesn’t
know, when you get the tickets for a Coachella, it comes in this
beautiful box with your wristbands, your tickets. It’s like a
treasure chest of awesome. And one of the years, the box came with a
full AR app that brought it all the life. How did that come along?
Sam: I think usually when the
Welcome Box lands, it’s like a really exciting time for the fans. And
so we always like to think of experiences that can allude to programs
and initiatives that we’re working on for that year that we can,
like, announce and promote to people during that time. And I think
just the idea of… that year, we recreated like a lot of historic
Coachella art pieces and a new fun, interesting way. And then when
you scanned the Coachella box, it was like this little miniature
version of Coachella with some historical art pieces and some art
pieces from that year. Everything was all lit up and glowing and
sparkling and zoom your phone really far, I think it was the first
time that those 2D triggers really were being seen by the public. It
was just a good opportunity for us to do something that excited
people, and hopefully generated some user content.
Alan: [There was] all sorts of
stuff around, it was pretty awesome. So last year in 20… I guess
this year, 2019, you guys stepped it up in a big way with augmented
reality. You want to talk about the… I just got to talk about the
Spaceship, man. It was crazy.
Sam: Yeah. It was really fun. I
think a little bit of context and background; We at some point in the
future — I don’t think anybody really knows when — but we’re gonna
work very closely with artists to help them develop XR content for
their performances. A very important part of an artist’s performance
that I think a lot of people don’t think about is the stage from
which they’re performing on. And that stage introduces a lot of
confines and restrictions as to what the artists can do, and how the
fan is going to view the show. We’re not ready. I don’t think artists
are ready to incorporate that content into their performances. I
think it’s a little bit cost-prohibitive. But what we could do is
start to scope out what it looks like to build XR experiences around
a music festival stage. That was kind of the point of the activation
that we did this year — I would say this last year too, but it’s
still 2019 — last year we worked with a vendor called Portals XR,
and we equipped the music festival stage with AR for the first time.
We chose the Sahara tent, which is a stage that holds some of the
most visually-impactful production at the entire festival. It’s where
we look to book a lot of EDM and hip hop acts, and I think there is
kind of a younger demo there. And we figured that perhaps–
Alan: That stage is amazing, I
got to see David Guetta on that stage. He was awesome.
Sam: A lot of dance music and
hip hop have played that festival stage since that music really got
re-popularized in the early teens. So what we did was, they ingested
a bunch of stage renderings from our stage design vendor and created
a virtual replica of that stage. And we used the screens as markers
to activate the content. And then we designed a bunch of different
space-themed 3D elements and position them inside the tent. So some
of those elements were positioned universally for all users — which
means that everyone saw them in the same location based on where you
were scanning the screen from — and then some AR positioned locally.
And there were elements that were kind of duplicated above the heads
of each user. The content we designed was three different phases. The
first was space objects; there was like a sun that was kind of
centrally located in the middle of the tent, with various planets
orbiting around it. And then the next phase was more focused around
manmade objects. And there is a space station and asteroids and of
course, like this gigantic, almost life-size space shuttle that came
out of the middle of the tent, it would just fly back and forth
throughout it.
We also did a 3D rendering and
animation of this astronaut art installation that we had on site this
year that was called Overview Effect. And the last phase was another
animation of an art installation called HIPO — that stands for
Hazardous Inter-Planetary Object — it was this artist group that’s
been at Coachella three times, and it’s essentially a bunch of people
dressed up as hippos, and they attempt to build the various
structures on-site. And this year was like a really discombobulated
and disjointed spacecraft. We animated it flying around the tent with
hippos hanging off it and crashing into things. We wanted to have
three phases because we wanted there to be something different for
people each time they came back. And these experiences only happened
in between artists’ sets. So it wasn’t happening while artists were
playing, because we don’t want to interfere with artists’ shows and
we also really don’t want to try and enable or inspire people to be
using their phones during artists’ performances. I don’t think they
want it. Truthfully, I’m not really not convinced that people want to
experience things through their phones.
Alan: They might want to capture
a segment and throw it on Instagram. And that’s about it.
Sam: Exactly. Exactly. So we’re
trying to stay away from that, for at least these first few years
until we gather some more learnings.
Alan: Do you think it will
change when it goes to head-worn? Because if I’m wearing a pair of
glasses and can still dance and see my friends and party, but the
stage is in three dimensions all around me, that’s different than
holding up a six-inch phone or whatever it is, and trying to look
through a screen.
Sam: 100 percent agree.
Alan: And the great thing about
what you guys did there is there’s lots of time in between acts.
You’ve got maybe half an hour or 40 minutes in between Jacked on each
stage. So that gives you this beautiful window of time to experiment.
Sam: Totally. That was exactly
the idea.
Alan: How did you get people to
do it? Did you put things up on the screen?
Sam: We have a lot of different
marketing channels. We were talking about it on socials, on-site. We
were sending mobile messages. We have very, very high penetration of
people who are using the Coachella application on-site, and we can
send messages to them based on where they are. So we sent a lot of
messages to people as they walking into the Sahara tent with
instructions on how to use the experience. And I think that’s where
we’ve got a lot of people.
Alan: It’s super, super cool. I
really regret not getting to Coachella this year.
Sam: We should have had you come
and DJ, Alan.
Alan: I actually DJ’ed for
Heiniken House a few years ago. We brought the Emulator there and we
built — because, along the lines of technology, Heineken being one
of the sponsors that year (I think every year pretty much) — they
brought the emulator in, and instead of letting the DJs play on it,
which is cool, they let the audience play on it and try and make
their own mixes. We turned it into a thing called the Remix-perience.
It allowed anybody to walk up, and it was all these buttons with 32
buttons on it, and didn’t matter what button or combination you
pressed. One row was vocals. One was synths. One was bass. One was
drums. And you could just make your own thing. So basically, it was a
big MIDI controller for Ableton in the backend.
Sam: That’s very cool.
Alan: Super cool. We had a lot
of fun too. To mix of Coachella was awesome.
Sam: Yeah, very much so.
Alan: We were staying in the
Heineken… not the Heineken House on-site, but they actually rent a
giant house, and we’re staying there and we went to a party next door
and it was Skrillex, his place that he rented.
Sam: Yes, I think I was actually
at that party, funny enough.
Alan: There was all kind of
industry people.
Sam: Yeah. Yeah.
Alan: So much fun. So what is
something that you kind of have seen in the last six months since
Coachella that you’re like, “wow, we’ve got to try that.”
What’s something that’s wowed you? Because I mean, you’re creating
“wow.” What wows you?
Yeah, sure. I mean, this industry and
this field is so exciting, because there’s so much happening at all
times. I think, off the top of my head, a few things that are
exciting are when I think of a lot of the progress that has been made
around the cloud, and the ability to create point clouds and
renderings of 3D objects to build AR experiences on top of, that are,
like, three-dimensional. That technology is now a lot easier. We’ve
seen Snapchat introduce the capability with land markers and I think
there’s a lot of players in the space that are doing some really
exciting things, enabling people to capture the point clouds with
just their phone cameras and making those 3-D maps small enough for a
file size that we can deploy it on-site at an event. We’re always
worried about connectivity. If you’ve been to Coachella you know it’s
not always easy to get a signal. So those point clouds that are small
enough to be able to deliver to people on-site is important stuff. I
think a lot of the engines that are enabling people to overlay AR
content onto videos and like live videos, I think all that is really,
really interesting.
Alan: You’ve got to meet my
friend Luke from Geni.
Sam: Yeah, I know Luke.
Alan: You know Luke? Awesome.
Sam: Yeah, yeah.
Alan: Luke’s a good friend. So,
yeah. That’s exactly what they do, is overly AR on top of videos.
Moving videos.
Sam: Yeah, I know.
Alan: It’s not an easy problem
to solve, actually.
Sam: No, not at all. I think
that creates some interesting opportunities for artists to capture
content — live content –, with AR elements on top of that, whether
that relates to a show or something in one of their studios or
whatever it may be.
Alan: Because everybody watches
music videos on YouTube these days. So even having a little symbol at
the bottom, saying “point your phone at this symbol,” and
maybe it’s just a bar code or something. But being able to use your
phone — because let’s be honest, everybody sits there with their
phone watching TV, like it’s just a thing — if you’ve already got
your phone in your hand, why not point it at the TV and see
three-dimensional things coming out of the TV screen at home? At a
concert that’s different, you want to be fully there and present with
your friends. But sitting at home watching a YouTube video, it would
be pretty awesome to have Eminem step out and be in your living room.
Sam: For sure. I totally agree.
I think the last thing I’ll add to that list is just the decreased
cost of producing experiences like this, I think, will enable us to
deploy more, and offer them to some of our brand partners as well.
Alan: And I don’t know if it’s
been done or it’s been in the works, but I want to see a volumetric
capture stage, or just a volumetric capture rig setup for a brand,
where people can basically get a 30-second selfie of them
volumetrically, and then push that out and send an AR selfie from
Coachella with all their friends.
Sam: I think that would be
really awesome. As soon as you find a way to make that somewhat
affordable, you let me know.
Alan: We’ll talk offline. I have
a few solutions to that.
Sam: OK, great.
Alan: I mean, let’s be honest:
it’s pretty badass to be able to do a volumetric selfie.
Sam: Yeah, for sure it is. I
think it’s also the ability to deploy or distribute that selfie in a
way that keeps it volumetric and as an AR asset is also important.
Alan: Yeah, we just invested in
a platform that will allow you to do that on Web. Completely on Web.
That’ll be launched next year. But yeah, we’ll talk. Super fun. What
else have you seen that you’re just like “man, we got to have
that?” I know we can’t talk about what’s coming up next this
year or next year, but let’s dig in to see what excites you. What
have you seen? Have you tried Magic Leap?
Sam: I have tried the Magic
Leap, yeah. And Nreal.
Alan: The Nreal ones are great.
Sam: A few of the others. Yeah,
they are. I would love to do some sort of activation on-site, almost
like a silent disco with–
Alan: Silent disco? What?
Sam: Yeah. It would be fun. The
only issue is that there is a lot of operational difficulties in
terms of distributing those glasses, the cost of those glasses.
Getting someone to pay for it and such. But I think something like
that will be very possible. And sometime in the next few years.
That’ll be fun. I think also it’s interesting. That is really
exciting me is the innovation happening around UX and UI for AR
experiences, and what the UX/UI overlay on top of a camera for people
who are experiencing an AR world of sorts will look like.
Alan: Have you seen the new
Snapchat glasses?
Sam: I have not.
Alan: So version 3… and
Snapchat, listen; I think Snapchat is gonna be the sleeper. You’ve
got Magic Leap, you’ve got Nreal, you’ve got HoloLens, you’ve got all
these companies. But Snapchat, their new glasses, just do what they
did before, they take a video, but in post-production. So you stream
the video to your phone and then you can add digital content on it
after the fact and then post it as if it was in the real world while
you were making the video. That’s gonna be super cool.
Sam: That is gonna be super
cool. I agree with you that there’s the sleeper. I feel like they’ve
kind of just pivoted a little bit and are working actively towards
becoming this AR platform of the future, and kind of really focusing
on that. Right?
Alan: Well, if you think about
it, my guess is — and I could be wrong on this, but I don’t think so
— Snapchat is the biggest user of augmented reality in the world.
Hands down. They do about a trillion stops a year and a huge number
of those, proportionately, I think it’s something like 90 percent of
Snapchat users have used the AR function in the last week. It’s nuts.
And they don’t use the word “AR” at all. They just use the
lens, so people that are using ARE are not even thinking about it as
AR, which is fine. That’s great.
Sam: Yeah, I think that’s really
important, when it comes to how as business owners, how we position
these types of experiences. I think there’s a lot of people who tend
to use the industry jargon, which is kind of unapproachable to the
end consumer. We did some surveys last year and we found out that the
majority of people — we were just surveying people inside the Sahara
tent — asking them a few quick questions about AR, and the majority
people have no idea what that is. So I think sometimes we tend to use
industry jargon in our public-facing promotions, because we want
people to think that we’re forward-thinking and cutting-edge, when in
reality, we could probably do a lot better for engagement and for
just involving people in the program if we built more of a story
around it, and didn’t use those types of words. Like Snapchat does;
they’re like, “space filters,” and they’re creating
experiences that are AR, but people don’t think of it like that. And
so theirs is a little bit more approachable to them. And I think
that’s really important.
Alan: And I think one of the
things that even location-based VR, for example, one of the things
that I realized was amazing in Dubai was this place called VR Park.
And they took regular HTC Vive Games, which only need a 10×10 space.
And if you look at it, it’s not very sexy. It’s two sensors and the
headset. But what it did was they put a whole physical set around it.
So when you walked into the thing, you were in a bank. It was the
John Wick game. So you walked into this bank and it was all built
like a facade. And then you went into a bank vault and like all the
drawers were scattered everywhere. Then you put on the VR headset and
you’re kind of in that realm. And I thought that was a really good
way to prepare people emotionally and psychologically for the
experience. The Void is the opposite of that, where they’ve built
everything into the experience, where they’ve got scent machines and
haptics and things you can touch. But it’s all digital mixed with the
kind of physical that you can’t see. And I don’t know if you’ve ever
been to The Void, but if you take your heads off, it’s pretty
uninspiring. It’s just like, wood walls, there’s nothing there. It
totally breaks your presence.
Sam: Totally. I did the IMAX
experience that was around — I don’t know if it’s still around in
L.A. — who would you recommend, on that note? Void or Sandbox, which
is the more compelling experience? Have you tried them both?
Alan: Which one?
Sam: The Void or the Sandbox VR?
Alan: I haven’t tried Sandbox’s.
I’ve done the Void. How’s Sandbox?
Sam: I haven’t done it yet.
That’s why I was asking you, is it worthwhile?
Alan: The Void is amazing. If I
were you guys, I would even just make a deal with the Void to have a
Void system setup at Coachella, for 20 bucks a person the whole
weekend, because it is an amazing experience, and you can share with
multiple people.
Sam: Interesting.
Alan: It would take nothing to
build on site. I don’t think.
Sam: Because it’s really just a
box, isn’t it?
Alan: What they did — and I
think why Sandbox is gonna be successful — is because they didn’t go
for these giant free-room spaces. They took a 2,500 square foot space
and made it through redirected walking. So you feel like you’re in
this infinite space moving around and interacting with things, but
you’re really in a small room with a door.
Sam: Yeah, that’s interesting.
It is wise to keep the square footage down because ultimately those
businesses are also real estate businesses too.
Alan: 100 percent. It comes down
to number of people you can get through per hour. So it’s throughput
times the square footage, and that’s how you get your revenue model.
So having a big footprint is not in your best interest as a
location-based entertainment experience.
Sam: Yeah. That same throughput
is how we predict experiences like that at Coachella. We had a big
projection-mapped dome experience that HP was the brand partner on.
And you know, we’re thinking about that experience. We’re constantly
measuring throughput. How many people are gonna see it? How many
hours is the festival open? What’s the line going to be like? All
those things are really important metrics when we consider those
physical activation experiences.
Alan: It’s absolutely true. And
I think one of the things that Coachella does really well is spread
it out so that there’s adventure in every corner. Even if you just
look at the map of Coachella; it’s vast, like walking from one end of
the festival to the other is like 40 minutes. It’s a really amazing
experience to be in such a big place. But at night, you’ve got the
silent disco times. You’ve got, what is it, seven stages? Six stages?
Sam: Yeah, seven stages.
Alan: Food vendors everywhere.
And one of the stages is like a nightclub. You walk in, it’s the
middle of the day in…
Sam: Yuma Tent!
Alan: Oh, my God. It’s so
amazing walking in. It’s totally blacked out. Laser lights, smoke.
You feel like it’s like 5:00 in the morning. You’re jammin out. You
walk outside, it’s sunny. It’s like noon. Crazy.
Sam: Yuma tent was cool. Yuma
tent came around before, like, the house and techno revolution even
hit America and it’s been just chugging along ever since. It’s a fan
favorite for sure.
Alan: Yeah. My buddy does the
lighting there. Steve Lieberman, he does a lot of the lighting for
that specific tent.
Sam: Very cool.
Alan: He does like all stage
designs for monster festivals and stuff. So it’s pretty exciting
stuff.
Sam: The lighting in that tent
alone is incredible.
Alan: It really is.
Sam: How far can you take club
lighting and put it in the context of music festival?
Alan: Apparently pretty far.
Sam: Yeah, very far!
Alan: I’m looking at some of the
new stages coming out of EDC and like just the big festivals and man,
every year there’s a new type of light. This year there’s one that’s
like a really, really tight, thin beam on a moving head. When you
have a hundred of them coming out of the stage, it’s just, “wow,
that’s incredible.”.
Sam: Yeah. They really start
blending the lines between lights and lasers and the functionality of
both. It’s pretty, pretty awesome.
Alan: It really is. And that’s
really a form of of virtual and augmented reality. You’re augmenting
the whole space. A good lighting designer not only kind of has this
front facing, “here’s all of the things,” but a lot of
it… like, for example, what’s the tent called? The big one with the
DJs?
Sam: Sahara.
Alan: Sahara tent. There’s
lights all over the tent. Above you, behind you, around you. It just
makes you feel like you’re in something bigger than just a stage with
an artist in front. It’s all enveloping your senses.
Sam: Immersive, I think, is the
word we like to use.
Alan: That is the word!It is.
And now I have a question. Have you guys ever thought about using
scent machines as part of the stage show?
Sam: You know, it might have
been proposed at some point. I don’t work around stage production or
artist production. That’s much more well-equipped colleagues of mine.
I’m sure they’ve proposed it at some point.
Alan: So the thing with AR,
you’ve got glasses — Nreal, Magic Leap — we go to these glasses.
But really it comes down to anything at scale right now. It’s the
device in everybody’s pocket. It’s the little magic window of your
phone. But it’s predicted, and I think we’re on track, that over
2-billion smartphones will be AR enabled by the end of this year.
Sam: I sure hope so. That is the
focus of our mobile AR strategy at Coachella: Smartphones.
Alan: So let me ask you a
question. And this goes beyond the actual festiva;. How do you then
engage people that aren’t at the festival to participate somehow?
Because, like, I can’t always be there, but I would love to
participate. So how do you see that happening?
Sam: I think that part of that
has to come with volumetric experiences. And I think part of it has
to come with enabling artists to deploy AR content that they might
own through the mobile application. Because we have more people
download the application than even attend the festival. So there’s a
lot of people like yourself who download the application, and they
want to know about Coachella, what’s happening, and what’s new. What
we’re tinkering with — and there’s a lot of artists now who have
created AR content for their brand or their music releases, whether
it’s a phase filter or a portal of some sort — when you go onto
artists’ pages on the app, you can see various links out to their
social platforms; to music with our partner, YouTube Music. And, you
know, one day there will be a place where you can see AR content that
they’ve created and want to deploy at Coachella or either people to
take pictures with on-site or for people who are at home watching the
YouTube livestream, to deploy into their coffee table.
Alan: Cannot wait! I’m so
excited. How many employees does Coachella have for that one
festival?
Thousands and thousands. I don’t know
an exact number, but the staff for Coachella, it goes up and down
over the course of the year, depending upon the season. But come
January, there’s a lot of people that start working full time on the
festival all the way through the end of April. And so it balloons
from January through April, and then the month of April when you have
a lot of the temporary but very important staff on site like security
guards and stage managers and the people who are building the stages.
You know, it gets to thousands and thousands of people.
Alan: Have you guys ever thought
about using VR as a training mechanism for those thousands of people?
Something as simple as putting them in an experience where they just
get to kind of wander around from point to point, so that people that
are maybe new to the festival who don’t know where everything is,
they can familiarize themselves with not only the safety and
security, but also where things are now so that they’re more helpful
on on-site.
Yeah, sure. I think it’s an interesting
concept. There’s also just at this time, a cost/benefit analysis that
we have to run. You know, if we’re gonna give them a virtual tour of
Coachella, what does it cost to create that virtual space of
Coachella? How else are we leveraging that asset or utilizing it in
other programs? These are just kind of the questions that we have to
ask ourselves. But I think as the tech to produce and just deploy
those things gets cheaper, it’s definitely something that we would
look at, especially when it comes to jobs that might be a little
risky or unsafe to practice or training and giving people the ability
to do that in a virtual space would be important and safer.
Alan: I think also we’ve been
talking about this on the show repeatedly, but one VR headset can
train multiple people. You could provide training to 100, 200 people
with one headset. It doesn’t have to be one headset per person. So I
think there’s definitely, for the unsafe and risky, but also just
general understanding of where things are before people come on site.
Because thousands of employees, you want to make sure they all have a
baseline of knowledge of things. And with VR, you can actually start
to test that as well, and then test their proficiency. And not so
much test them as just make sure they’re prepared.
Sam: Absolutely. Especially when
it comes down to a lot of times, the security guards are the front
line from the fans perspective. They likely will not talk to one
Goldenvoice staff member their entire time at Coachella, but they
talk to security guards all the time, asking them where things are,
where to find things, where the entrance or exit is. And those
security guard are great for that reason. And it would probably be
more beneficial if they knew where specific things were that
sometimes they might not know the answer to. So it would be useful
from a training perspective, and it would also be useful for a fan
perspective, if they could get an idea before they enter the festival
site, kind of get a virtual tour of the festival site — without
giving away anything, of course.
Alan: Let’s talk about it
further off line, because I think this is something that intrigues
me. How do we train thousands of people quickly and bring them up to
a certain level of proficiency and then reuse those assets for a
different way? And one of the things that we keep telling our
customers is, look, if you’re going to build like a virtual whatever,
maybe it’s a machine and you bring in your CAD data and you train
somebody on the machine. Well, that same 3D data that we just spent,
maybe $50,000 taking it from CAD to putting it into 3D and then
putting it into VR. Well, that same thing, that same asset, can be
used in a AR. It can be used on your Web site. It can be used for
training, can be used for marketing. I think a lot of companies see
it as just a cost center, like, “oh, this is going to cost a lot
of money.” But if you, like you said, re-use and recycle this
material throughout the organization, you actually end up spreading
out the cost quite a bit and getting more value and benefit from it.
Sam: Yeah, I absolutely agree.
Should definitely have that conversation.
Alan: We shall. Awesome. What
else do you want to talk about? Is there anything else that you want
to talk about? To share before we wrap this up?
Sam: You know, I think maybe
just kind of hype — and I know that kind of purpose of this podcast
is to kind of help inform and inspire people to use XR — and I think
there’s a lot of incredible advice out there around the technology
and its use cases in a business context. But I think what a lot of
people don’t talk about enough is just that we should always be
thinking about ways in which we can tell a story and create a program
that I think is more relatable and fits in to… it has to obviously
fit into the brand, but, you know, you can also think about how that
fits into the story of consumers who use your products or services.
There was a really great example. One of my favorite business use
cases was El Pollo Loco did this mural activation. Did you see
anything about it?
Alan: I didn’t actually dig into
it, but I did see that it was there. It basically hold your phone up
to I think was a painting on a wall or something, wasn’t it?
Sam: Yeah. It was in honor of
Hispanic Heritage Month and El Pollo Loco celebrated Mexican heritage
and a lot of their customers by bringing five different murals to
life in L.A. And there was also like a real-world aspect to their
initiative where they donated some of their storefronts as a place
for real-life murals to take place.
Alan: Super cool.
Sam: I thought that was just
such a great story. That’s super relatable. And if you’re a person
who has no idea anything about AR or even what that means, it’s still
something that is going to inspire you to pick up the phone and give
it a try. And I think that’s an example of a great success in this
space.
Alan: I love things that bring a
wider education or social aspect to it like that, bringing a focus to
Hispanic heritage. It’s really wonderful. And for anybody who’s
flying into L.A., El Pollo Loco is within a block of the airport.
It’s always my first up. Those dollar chicken things are great. And
then In and Out Burger. Man, that’s like my L.A. staple.
Sam: Where is In And Out’s AR
experience, man?
Alan: It doesn’t seem like a
brand fit. To be honest.
Sam: They’re definitely not a
brand fit. They have five things on the menu for the entire lifetime
of the company.
Alan: No, probably not. What is
one problem in the world that you want to see solved using XR
technologies?
Sam: I think that XR’s power to
inspire empathy in certain situations is really strong. So I don’t
necessarily have one specific problem, but I think that people who
can use VR to view the planet from above, or experience a day in the
life of someone who lives in a favela, or use AR to better understand
issues or problems that are plaguing society around the world. The
use of that technology will inspire more people to get involved with
these issues, and that’s kind of a sum result that I’m excited to
experience.
View all episodes
By Alan Smithson from MetaVRse
4.5
1212 ratings
Alan puts it best in this episode of XR for Business: Sam Schoonover’s job with Goldenvoice is to create “wow” moments at music festivals like Coachella. Sam talks about the groundwork they’ve laid at Coachella for immersive reality so far, and where he plans to take it going forward.
Alan: Coming up next on the XR
for Business Podcast, we have Sam Schoon over from Goldenvoice and
Coachella, my favorite music festival in the world. We’re going to be
talking about augmented reality spaceships, augmented reality
portals, bringing video to life in a AR and El Pollo Loco. All that
and more coming up next on the XR for Business Podcast.
Sam, welcome to the show.
Sam: Hi. Thanks for having me.
Alan: It’s my absolute pleasure,
man. As you know — and as people on the show who know because I’ve
mentioned it before — Coachella is one of my absolute favorite music
festivals. And having been a deejay for 20 years myself, I’ve been to
a few. Coachella is just this magical place. So I’m really excited to
unlock two of my favorite things — music festivals and XR — with
you on the show. So, thank you so much.
Sam: Yeah, absolutely. Me as
well. I think a lot of people out there would agree with you.
Alan: Yeah, man. So tell me, how
did you end up working with Coachella and what have you done before
and how did you get there? Let’s just get into it.
Sam: Previous to this job, I was
doing a whole assortment of different things in the music industry,
and I guess the technology industry as well. I was a freelance
website developer, and had also been curating music and had developed
a playlist curation application. And then alongside that, I was
promoting with various promoters in San Diego and Los Angeles and
touring shows. And that eventually — that and a music blog and I was
doing at the time — introduced me to the guy who started Splash
House, which is a smaller music festival in Palm Springs. And through
him, I met the Goldenvoice team and I got involved at Goldenvoice
Digital, and in a roundabout way, ended up focusing entirely on
innovation just for Coachella.
Alan: What a dream job for
somebody like… “here, your job is to focus on innovation, make
really cool things that nobody’s done in the world, for the most
impressive festivals in the world.”
Sam: Yeah, sure. I mean, it’s a
lot of fun. It’s fun to be able to focus on new things every day. And
we have like just such an incredible team at Goldenvoice, the people
who have been doing Coachella for the past 20 years are still
involved and still loving it. And they’re really the reason why this
job even exists, because they appreciate innovation and they
understand its place and our future. And and they understand that
innovating and experimenting and sometimes failing, but always trying
is a part of what makes things great and stand the test of time.
Coachella is in a unique situation, where it’s a successful music
festival and it’s a successful business, so we have the ability to
spend money on experiences like that, while not every festival out
there is so lucky.
Alan: Yeah. And you guys —
well, “you guys,” I think it was before you even got there
— but Coachella is no stranger to virtual and augmented reality. I
remember in, oh man, it must be 2015/16, Coachella livestreamed 360
content to VR headsets and I believe it was pushing to the — it was!
— it was the Samsung GearyVR at the time. I remember watching one of
one of the shows from there and thinking, “oh man, I’m literally
like getting crazy FOMO.”
Sam: Yeah, you’re right. It was
kind of our first foray actually into, like, I guess what we would
call the VR industry. I think as a lot of us have learned, those 360
music streaming experiences aren’t super compelling. And I just think
the live music experience is so incredible that they haven’t come
close to replicating that quite yet. But nonetheless, there was a lot
of great learnings. I think it was really fun and also important to
us from a branding perspective to be amongst the first live events
even doing something like that. And it was also a fun addition to the
YouTube livestream, which is a really important experience for us and
the fans.
Alan: I think there is a value
to this. Still, the first experience I ever saw in VR was the Beck
concert by Chris Milk. And I think people did the 360 video and then
they kind of got away from it, but I think it still has value in the
fact that being able to be in places where you can’t go — you can’t
stand next to the artist onstage at Coachella, you can’t be on stage,
you can’t fly over the crowd — there’s certain things like that
where I think there’s still gonna be a value in capturing that
content. And I think the next thing would be how do we capture it
volumetrically? But it’s crazy. But another thing that in 2016, 2017,
you guys did an AR [experience], The Box. For anyone who doesn’t
know, when you get the tickets for a Coachella, it comes in this
beautiful box with your wristbands, your tickets. It’s like a
treasure chest of awesome. And one of the years, the box came with a
full AR app that brought it all the life. How did that come along?
Sam: I think usually when the
Welcome Box lands, it’s like a really exciting time for the fans. And
so we always like to think of experiences that can allude to programs
and initiatives that we’re working on for that year that we can,
like, announce and promote to people during that time. And I think
just the idea of… that year, we recreated like a lot of historic
Coachella art pieces and a new fun, interesting way. And then when
you scanned the Coachella box, it was like this little miniature
version of Coachella with some historical art pieces and some art
pieces from that year. Everything was all lit up and glowing and
sparkling and zoom your phone really far, I think it was the first
time that those 2D triggers really were being seen by the public. It
was just a good opportunity for us to do something that excited
people, and hopefully generated some user content.
Alan: [There was] all sorts of
stuff around, it was pretty awesome. So last year in 20… I guess
this year, 2019, you guys stepped it up in a big way with augmented
reality. You want to talk about the… I just got to talk about the
Spaceship, man. It was crazy.
Sam: Yeah. It was really fun. I
think a little bit of context and background; We at some point in the
future — I don’t think anybody really knows when — but we’re gonna
work very closely with artists to help them develop XR content for
their performances. A very important part of an artist’s performance
that I think a lot of people don’t think about is the stage from
which they’re performing on. And that stage introduces a lot of
confines and restrictions as to what the artists can do, and how the
fan is going to view the show. We’re not ready. I don’t think artists
are ready to incorporate that content into their performances. I
think it’s a little bit cost-prohibitive. But what we could do is
start to scope out what it looks like to build XR experiences around
a music festival stage. That was kind of the point of the activation
that we did this year — I would say this last year too, but it’s
still 2019 — last year we worked with a vendor called Portals XR,
and we equipped the music festival stage with AR for the first time.
We chose the Sahara tent, which is a stage that holds some of the
most visually-impactful production at the entire festival. It’s where
we look to book a lot of EDM and hip hop acts, and I think there is
kind of a younger demo there. And we figured that perhaps–
Alan: That stage is amazing, I
got to see David Guetta on that stage. He was awesome.
Sam: A lot of dance music and
hip hop have played that festival stage since that music really got
re-popularized in the early teens. So what we did was, they ingested
a bunch of stage renderings from our stage design vendor and created
a virtual replica of that stage. And we used the screens as markers
to activate the content. And then we designed a bunch of different
space-themed 3D elements and position them inside the tent. So some
of those elements were positioned universally for all users — which
means that everyone saw them in the same location based on where you
were scanning the screen from — and then some AR positioned locally.
And there were elements that were kind of duplicated above the heads
of each user. The content we designed was three different phases. The
first was space objects; there was like a sun that was kind of
centrally located in the middle of the tent, with various planets
orbiting around it. And then the next phase was more focused around
manmade objects. And there is a space station and asteroids and of
course, like this gigantic, almost life-size space shuttle that came
out of the middle of the tent, it would just fly back and forth
throughout it.
We also did a 3D rendering and
animation of this astronaut art installation that we had on site this
year that was called Overview Effect. And the last phase was another
animation of an art installation called HIPO — that stands for
Hazardous Inter-Planetary Object — it was this artist group that’s
been at Coachella three times, and it’s essentially a bunch of people
dressed up as hippos, and they attempt to build the various
structures on-site. And this year was like a really discombobulated
and disjointed spacecraft. We animated it flying around the tent with
hippos hanging off it and crashing into things. We wanted to have
three phases because we wanted there to be something different for
people each time they came back. And these experiences only happened
in between artists’ sets. So it wasn’t happening while artists were
playing, because we don’t want to interfere with artists’ shows and
we also really don’t want to try and enable or inspire people to be
using their phones during artists’ performances. I don’t think they
want it. Truthfully, I’m not really not convinced that people want to
experience things through their phones.
Alan: They might want to capture
a segment and throw it on Instagram. And that’s about it.
Sam: Exactly. Exactly. So we’re
trying to stay away from that, for at least these first few years
until we gather some more learnings.
Alan: Do you think it will
change when it goes to head-worn? Because if I’m wearing a pair of
glasses and can still dance and see my friends and party, but the
stage is in three dimensions all around me, that’s different than
holding up a six-inch phone or whatever it is, and trying to look
through a screen.
Sam: 100 percent agree.
Alan: And the great thing about
what you guys did there is there’s lots of time in between acts.
You’ve got maybe half an hour or 40 minutes in between Jacked on each
stage. So that gives you this beautiful window of time to experiment.
Sam: Totally. That was exactly
the idea.
Alan: How did you get people to
do it? Did you put things up on the screen?
Sam: We have a lot of different
marketing channels. We were talking about it on socials, on-site. We
were sending mobile messages. We have very, very high penetration of
people who are using the Coachella application on-site, and we can
send messages to them based on where they are. So we sent a lot of
messages to people as they walking into the Sahara tent with
instructions on how to use the experience. And I think that’s where
we’ve got a lot of people.
Alan: It’s super, super cool. I
really regret not getting to Coachella this year.
Sam: We should have had you come
and DJ, Alan.
Alan: I actually DJ’ed for
Heiniken House a few years ago. We brought the Emulator there and we
built — because, along the lines of technology, Heineken being one
of the sponsors that year (I think every year pretty much) — they
brought the emulator in, and instead of letting the DJs play on it,
which is cool, they let the audience play on it and try and make
their own mixes. We turned it into a thing called the Remix-perience.
It allowed anybody to walk up, and it was all these buttons with 32
buttons on it, and didn’t matter what button or combination you
pressed. One row was vocals. One was synths. One was bass. One was
drums. And you could just make your own thing. So basically, it was a
big MIDI controller for Ableton in the backend.
Sam: That’s very cool.
Alan: Super cool. We had a lot
of fun too. To mix of Coachella was awesome.
Sam: Yeah, very much so.
Alan: We were staying in the
Heineken… not the Heineken House on-site, but they actually rent a
giant house, and we’re staying there and we went to a party next door
and it was Skrillex, his place that he rented.
Sam: Yes, I think I was actually
at that party, funny enough.
Alan: There was all kind of
industry people.
Sam: Yeah. Yeah.
Alan: So much fun. So what is
something that you kind of have seen in the last six months since
Coachella that you’re like, “wow, we’ve got to try that.”
What’s something that’s wowed you? Because I mean, you’re creating
“wow.” What wows you?
Yeah, sure. I mean, this industry and
this field is so exciting, because there’s so much happening at all
times. I think, off the top of my head, a few things that are
exciting are when I think of a lot of the progress that has been made
around the cloud, and the ability to create point clouds and
renderings of 3D objects to build AR experiences on top of, that are,
like, three-dimensional. That technology is now a lot easier. We’ve
seen Snapchat introduce the capability with land markers and I think
there’s a lot of players in the space that are doing some really
exciting things, enabling people to capture the point clouds with
just their phone cameras and making those 3-D maps small enough for a
file size that we can deploy it on-site at an event. We’re always
worried about connectivity. If you’ve been to Coachella you know it’s
not always easy to get a signal. So those point clouds that are small
enough to be able to deliver to people on-site is important stuff. I
think a lot of the engines that are enabling people to overlay AR
content onto videos and like live videos, I think all that is really,
really interesting.
Alan: You’ve got to meet my
friend Luke from Geni.
Sam: Yeah, I know Luke.
Alan: You know Luke? Awesome.
Sam: Yeah, yeah.
Alan: Luke’s a good friend. So,
yeah. That’s exactly what they do, is overly AR on top of videos.
Moving videos.
Sam: Yeah, I know.
Alan: It’s not an easy problem
to solve, actually.
Sam: No, not at all. I think
that creates some interesting opportunities for artists to capture
content — live content –, with AR elements on top of that, whether
that relates to a show or something in one of their studios or
whatever it may be.
Alan: Because everybody watches
music videos on YouTube these days. So even having a little symbol at
the bottom, saying “point your phone at this symbol,” and
maybe it’s just a bar code or something. But being able to use your
phone — because let’s be honest, everybody sits there with their
phone watching TV, like it’s just a thing — if you’ve already got
your phone in your hand, why not point it at the TV and see
three-dimensional things coming out of the TV screen at home? At a
concert that’s different, you want to be fully there and present with
your friends. But sitting at home watching a YouTube video, it would
be pretty awesome to have Eminem step out and be in your living room.
Sam: For sure. I totally agree.
I think the last thing I’ll add to that list is just the decreased
cost of producing experiences like this, I think, will enable us to
deploy more, and offer them to some of our brand partners as well.
Alan: And I don’t know if it’s
been done or it’s been in the works, but I want to see a volumetric
capture stage, or just a volumetric capture rig setup for a brand,
where people can basically get a 30-second selfie of them
volumetrically, and then push that out and send an AR selfie from
Coachella with all their friends.
Sam: I think that would be
really awesome. As soon as you find a way to make that somewhat
affordable, you let me know.
Alan: We’ll talk offline. I have
a few solutions to that.
Sam: OK, great.
Alan: I mean, let’s be honest:
it’s pretty badass to be able to do a volumetric selfie.
Sam: Yeah, for sure it is. I
think it’s also the ability to deploy or distribute that selfie in a
way that keeps it volumetric and as an AR asset is also important.
Alan: Yeah, we just invested in
a platform that will allow you to do that on Web. Completely on Web.
That’ll be launched next year. But yeah, we’ll talk. Super fun. What
else have you seen that you’re just like “man, we got to have
that?” I know we can’t talk about what’s coming up next this
year or next year, but let’s dig in to see what excites you. What
have you seen? Have you tried Magic Leap?
Sam: I have tried the Magic
Leap, yeah. And Nreal.
Alan: The Nreal ones are great.
Sam: A few of the others. Yeah,
they are. I would love to do some sort of activation on-site, almost
like a silent disco with–
Alan: Silent disco? What?
Sam: Yeah. It would be fun. The
only issue is that there is a lot of operational difficulties in
terms of distributing those glasses, the cost of those glasses.
Getting someone to pay for it and such. But I think something like
that will be very possible. And sometime in the next few years.
That’ll be fun. I think also it’s interesting. That is really
exciting me is the innovation happening around UX and UI for AR
experiences, and what the UX/UI overlay on top of a camera for people
who are experiencing an AR world of sorts will look like.
Alan: Have you seen the new
Snapchat glasses?
Sam: I have not.
Alan: So version 3… and
Snapchat, listen; I think Snapchat is gonna be the sleeper. You’ve
got Magic Leap, you’ve got Nreal, you’ve got HoloLens, you’ve got all
these companies. But Snapchat, their new glasses, just do what they
did before, they take a video, but in post-production. So you stream
the video to your phone and then you can add digital content on it
after the fact and then post it as if it was in the real world while
you were making the video. That’s gonna be super cool.
Sam: That is gonna be super
cool. I agree with you that there’s the sleeper. I feel like they’ve
kind of just pivoted a little bit and are working actively towards
becoming this AR platform of the future, and kind of really focusing
on that. Right?
Alan: Well, if you think about
it, my guess is — and I could be wrong on this, but I don’t think so
— Snapchat is the biggest user of augmented reality in the world.
Hands down. They do about a trillion stops a year and a huge number
of those, proportionately, I think it’s something like 90 percent of
Snapchat users have used the AR function in the last week. It’s nuts.
And they don’t use the word “AR” at all. They just use the
lens, so people that are using ARE are not even thinking about it as
AR, which is fine. That’s great.
Sam: Yeah, I think that’s really
important, when it comes to how as business owners, how we position
these types of experiences. I think there’s a lot of people who tend
to use the industry jargon, which is kind of unapproachable to the
end consumer. We did some surveys last year and we found out that the
majority of people — we were just surveying people inside the Sahara
tent — asking them a few quick questions about AR, and the majority
people have no idea what that is. So I think sometimes we tend to use
industry jargon in our public-facing promotions, because we want
people to think that we’re forward-thinking and cutting-edge, when in
reality, we could probably do a lot better for engagement and for
just involving people in the program if we built more of a story
around it, and didn’t use those types of words. Like Snapchat does;
they’re like, “space filters,” and they’re creating
experiences that are AR, but people don’t think of it like that. And
so theirs is a little bit more approachable to them. And I think
that’s really important.
Alan: And I think one of the
things that even location-based VR, for example, one of the things
that I realized was amazing in Dubai was this place called VR Park.
And they took regular HTC Vive Games, which only need a 10×10 space.
And if you look at it, it’s not very sexy. It’s two sensors and the
headset. But what it did was they put a whole physical set around it.
So when you walked into the thing, you were in a bank. It was the
John Wick game. So you walked into this bank and it was all built
like a facade. And then you went into a bank vault and like all the
drawers were scattered everywhere. Then you put on the VR headset and
you’re kind of in that realm. And I thought that was a really good
way to prepare people emotionally and psychologically for the
experience. The Void is the opposite of that, where they’ve built
everything into the experience, where they’ve got scent machines and
haptics and things you can touch. But it’s all digital mixed with the
kind of physical that you can’t see. And I don’t know if you’ve ever
been to The Void, but if you take your heads off, it’s pretty
uninspiring. It’s just like, wood walls, there’s nothing there. It
totally breaks your presence.
Sam: Totally. I did the IMAX
experience that was around — I don’t know if it’s still around in
L.A. — who would you recommend, on that note? Void or Sandbox, which
is the more compelling experience? Have you tried them both?
Alan: Which one?
Sam: The Void or the Sandbox VR?
Alan: I haven’t tried Sandbox’s.
I’ve done the Void. How’s Sandbox?
Sam: I haven’t done it yet.
That’s why I was asking you, is it worthwhile?
Alan: The Void is amazing. If I
were you guys, I would even just make a deal with the Void to have a
Void system setup at Coachella, for 20 bucks a person the whole
weekend, because it is an amazing experience, and you can share with
multiple people.
Sam: Interesting.
Alan: It would take nothing to
build on site. I don’t think.
Sam: Because it’s really just a
box, isn’t it?
Alan: What they did — and I
think why Sandbox is gonna be successful — is because they didn’t go
for these giant free-room spaces. They took a 2,500 square foot space
and made it through redirected walking. So you feel like you’re in
this infinite space moving around and interacting with things, but
you’re really in a small room with a door.
Sam: Yeah, that’s interesting.
It is wise to keep the square footage down because ultimately those
businesses are also real estate businesses too.
Alan: 100 percent. It comes down
to number of people you can get through per hour. So it’s throughput
times the square footage, and that’s how you get your revenue model.
So having a big footprint is not in your best interest as a
location-based entertainment experience.
Sam: Yeah. That same throughput
is how we predict experiences like that at Coachella. We had a big
projection-mapped dome experience that HP was the brand partner on.
And you know, we’re thinking about that experience. We’re constantly
measuring throughput. How many people are gonna see it? How many
hours is the festival open? What’s the line going to be like? All
those things are really important metrics when we consider those
physical activation experiences.
Alan: It’s absolutely true. And
I think one of the things that Coachella does really well is spread
it out so that there’s adventure in every corner. Even if you just
look at the map of Coachella; it’s vast, like walking from one end of
the festival to the other is like 40 minutes. It’s a really amazing
experience to be in such a big place. But at night, you’ve got the
silent disco times. You’ve got, what is it, seven stages? Six stages?
Sam: Yeah, seven stages.
Alan: Food vendors everywhere.
And one of the stages is like a nightclub. You walk in, it’s the
middle of the day in…
Sam: Yuma Tent!
Alan: Oh, my God. It’s so
amazing walking in. It’s totally blacked out. Laser lights, smoke.
You feel like it’s like 5:00 in the morning. You’re jammin out. You
walk outside, it’s sunny. It’s like noon. Crazy.
Sam: Yuma tent was cool. Yuma
tent came around before, like, the house and techno revolution even
hit America and it’s been just chugging along ever since. It’s a fan
favorite for sure.
Alan: Yeah. My buddy does the
lighting there. Steve Lieberman, he does a lot of the lighting for
that specific tent.
Sam: Very cool.
Alan: He does like all stage
designs for monster festivals and stuff. So it’s pretty exciting
stuff.
Sam: The lighting in that tent
alone is incredible.
Alan: It really is.
Sam: How far can you take club
lighting and put it in the context of music festival?
Alan: Apparently pretty far.
Sam: Yeah, very far!
Alan: I’m looking at some of the
new stages coming out of EDC and like just the big festivals and man,
every year there’s a new type of light. This year there’s one that’s
like a really, really tight, thin beam on a moving head. When you
have a hundred of them coming out of the stage, it’s just, “wow,
that’s incredible.”.
Sam: Yeah. They really start
blending the lines between lights and lasers and the functionality of
both. It’s pretty, pretty awesome.
Alan: It really is. And that’s
really a form of of virtual and augmented reality. You’re augmenting
the whole space. A good lighting designer not only kind of has this
front facing, “here’s all of the things,” but a lot of
it… like, for example, what’s the tent called? The big one with the
DJs?
Sam: Sahara.
Alan: Sahara tent. There’s
lights all over the tent. Above you, behind you, around you. It just
makes you feel like you’re in something bigger than just a stage with
an artist in front. It’s all enveloping your senses.
Sam: Immersive, I think, is the
word we like to use.
Alan: That is the word!It is.
And now I have a question. Have you guys ever thought about using
scent machines as part of the stage show?
Sam: You know, it might have
been proposed at some point. I don’t work around stage production or
artist production. That’s much more well-equipped colleagues of mine.
I’m sure they’ve proposed it at some point.
Alan: So the thing with AR,
you’ve got glasses — Nreal, Magic Leap — we go to these glasses.
But really it comes down to anything at scale right now. It’s the
device in everybody’s pocket. It’s the little magic window of your
phone. But it’s predicted, and I think we’re on track, that over
2-billion smartphones will be AR enabled by the end of this year.
Sam: I sure hope so. That is the
focus of our mobile AR strategy at Coachella: Smartphones.
Alan: So let me ask you a
question. And this goes beyond the actual festiva;. How do you then
engage people that aren’t at the festival to participate somehow?
Because, like, I can’t always be there, but I would love to
participate. So how do you see that happening?
Sam: I think that part of that
has to come with volumetric experiences. And I think part of it has
to come with enabling artists to deploy AR content that they might
own through the mobile application. Because we have more people
download the application than even attend the festival. So there’s a
lot of people like yourself who download the application, and they
want to know about Coachella, what’s happening, and what’s new. What
we’re tinkering with — and there’s a lot of artists now who have
created AR content for their brand or their music releases, whether
it’s a phase filter or a portal of some sort — when you go onto
artists’ pages on the app, you can see various links out to their
social platforms; to music with our partner, YouTube Music. And, you
know, one day there will be a place where you can see AR content that
they’ve created and want to deploy at Coachella or either people to
take pictures with on-site or for people who are at home watching the
YouTube livestream, to deploy into their coffee table.
Alan: Cannot wait! I’m so
excited. How many employees does Coachella have for that one
festival?
Thousands and thousands. I don’t know
an exact number, but the staff for Coachella, it goes up and down
over the course of the year, depending upon the season. But come
January, there’s a lot of people that start working full time on the
festival all the way through the end of April. And so it balloons
from January through April, and then the month of April when you have
a lot of the temporary but very important staff on site like security
guards and stage managers and the people who are building the stages.
You know, it gets to thousands and thousands of people.
Alan: Have you guys ever thought
about using VR as a training mechanism for those thousands of people?
Something as simple as putting them in an experience where they just
get to kind of wander around from point to point, so that people that
are maybe new to the festival who don’t know where everything is,
they can familiarize themselves with not only the safety and
security, but also where things are now so that they’re more helpful
on on-site.
Yeah, sure. I think it’s an interesting
concept. There’s also just at this time, a cost/benefit analysis that
we have to run. You know, if we’re gonna give them a virtual tour of
Coachella, what does it cost to create that virtual space of
Coachella? How else are we leveraging that asset or utilizing it in
other programs? These are just kind of the questions that we have to
ask ourselves. But I think as the tech to produce and just deploy
those things gets cheaper, it’s definitely something that we would
look at, especially when it comes to jobs that might be a little
risky or unsafe to practice or training and giving people the ability
to do that in a virtual space would be important and safer.
Alan: I think also we’ve been
talking about this on the show repeatedly, but one VR headset can
train multiple people. You could provide training to 100, 200 people
with one headset. It doesn’t have to be one headset per person. So I
think there’s definitely, for the unsafe and risky, but also just
general understanding of where things are before people come on site.
Because thousands of employees, you want to make sure they all have a
baseline of knowledge of things. And with VR, you can actually start
to test that as well, and then test their proficiency. And not so
much test them as just make sure they’re prepared.
Sam: Absolutely. Especially when
it comes down to a lot of times, the security guards are the front
line from the fans perspective. They likely will not talk to one
Goldenvoice staff member their entire time at Coachella, but they
talk to security guards all the time, asking them where things are,
where to find things, where the entrance or exit is. And those
security guard are great for that reason. And it would probably be
more beneficial if they knew where specific things were that
sometimes they might not know the answer to. So it would be useful
from a training perspective, and it would also be useful for a fan
perspective, if they could get an idea before they enter the festival
site, kind of get a virtual tour of the festival site — without
giving away anything, of course.
Alan: Let’s talk about it
further off line, because I think this is something that intrigues
me. How do we train thousands of people quickly and bring them up to
a certain level of proficiency and then reuse those assets for a
different way? And one of the things that we keep telling our
customers is, look, if you’re going to build like a virtual whatever,
maybe it’s a machine and you bring in your CAD data and you train
somebody on the machine. Well, that same 3D data that we just spent,
maybe $50,000 taking it from CAD to putting it into 3D and then
putting it into VR. Well, that same thing, that same asset, can be
used in a AR. It can be used on your Web site. It can be used for
training, can be used for marketing. I think a lot of companies see
it as just a cost center, like, “oh, this is going to cost a lot
of money.” But if you, like you said, re-use and recycle this
material throughout the organization, you actually end up spreading
out the cost quite a bit and getting more value and benefit from it.
Sam: Yeah, I absolutely agree.
Should definitely have that conversation.
Alan: We shall. Awesome. What
else do you want to talk about? Is there anything else that you want
to talk about? To share before we wrap this up?
Sam: You know, I think maybe
just kind of hype — and I know that kind of purpose of this podcast
is to kind of help inform and inspire people to use XR — and I think
there’s a lot of incredible advice out there around the technology
and its use cases in a business context. But I think what a lot of
people don’t talk about enough is just that we should always be
thinking about ways in which we can tell a story and create a program
that I think is more relatable and fits in to… it has to obviously
fit into the brand, but, you know, you can also think about how that
fits into the story of consumers who use your products or services.
There was a really great example. One of my favorite business use
cases was El Pollo Loco did this mural activation. Did you see
anything about it?
Alan: I didn’t actually dig into
it, but I did see that it was there. It basically hold your phone up
to I think was a painting on a wall or something, wasn’t it?
Sam: Yeah. It was in honor of
Hispanic Heritage Month and El Pollo Loco celebrated Mexican heritage
and a lot of their customers by bringing five different murals to
life in L.A. And there was also like a real-world aspect to their
initiative where they donated some of their storefronts as a place
for real-life murals to take place.
Alan: Super cool.
Sam: I thought that was just
such a great story. That’s super relatable. And if you’re a person
who has no idea anything about AR or even what that means, it’s still
something that is going to inspire you to pick up the phone and give
it a try. And I think that’s an example of a great success in this
space.
Alan: I love things that bring a
wider education or social aspect to it like that, bringing a focus to
Hispanic heritage. It’s really wonderful. And for anybody who’s
flying into L.A., El Pollo Loco is within a block of the airport.
It’s always my first up. Those dollar chicken things are great. And
then In and Out Burger. Man, that’s like my L.A. staple.
Sam: Where is In And Out’s AR
experience, man?
Alan: It doesn’t seem like a
brand fit. To be honest.
Sam: They’re definitely not a
brand fit. They have five things on the menu for the entire lifetime
of the company.
Alan: No, probably not. What is
one problem in the world that you want to see solved using XR
technologies?
Sam: I think that XR’s power to
inspire empathy in certain situations is really strong. So I don’t
necessarily have one specific problem, but I think that people who
can use VR to view the planet from above, or experience a day in the
life of someone who lives in a favela, or use AR to better understand
issues or problems that are plaguing society around the world. The
use of that technology will inspire more people to get involved with
these issues, and that’s kind of a sum result that I’m excited to
experience.