She may not be real, but Hatsune Miku is a bonafide star.
The holographic pop singer started life as a promotional vehicle for
Japanese music software, but has since parlayed that into a career that
most real musicians would be envious of. She’s appeared on late night talk shows and toured the world,
and thanks to a partnership with Sega, she has her own line of rhythm
games. With the release of PlayStation VR back in October, she took the
next logical step: virtual reality.
Hatsune Miku: VR Future Live lets players attend
a virtual Miku concert from the comfort of their living rooms, complete
with pumping glow sticks, on-stage theatrics, and intimate encores.
It’s a very different experience compared to her previous video game
excursions, which are more traditional music games with a focus on
keeping in tune with the songs. VR Future Live, on the other
hand, is all about re-creating the feeling of being at a concert. And
for director Tetsuya Ohtsubo, there was a very specific moment when he
realized the concept had powerful potential.
“When Miku walked by me in VR, it felt like I’d touched
her twin-tail hair or her hands,” he says. “There was a sense that she
was really there in front of me, even though she wasn’t. It was a
surprising, almost shocking realization.”
The emotional connection of a concert is an important part of VR Future Live,
but the game was actually inspired by a much less exciting event. “This
thought first occurred to me while I was attending a PlayStation VR
technical lecture,” says producer Seiji Hayashi. “Because these
characters don’t have a physical form, I began to think that interacting
with them in a virtual realm would make their existence feel more
real.”
Hayashi was able to take that idea and run with it
largely because of Miku’s already extensive video game history with
Sega. The developer released the first entry in the Project Diva
rhythm game series on the PSP in Japan in 2009, and has since expanded
with multiple releases on consoles and in arcades. January will see the
launch of Hatsune Miku: Project Diva Future Tone on PS4 with
more than 200 songs to play through. That wealth of experience gave the
developers at Sega a base from which to build the blue-haired pop star’s
VR debut, as VR Future Live uses many of the same technologies and visual assets as previous games.
At the same time, the creators didn’t want to simply
re-create the experience of past games — hence the concert concept. “We
felt that making the VR experience another rhythm game of a similar
nature would be meaningless,” explains Hayashi. “So instead, we focused
on how to maximize the fun of Hatsune Miku’s performances and pair it
with a virtual world in a meaningful way.”
VR Future Live does a surprisingly convincing
job at re-creating the concert experience. When you enter the virtual
stadium you’re surrounded by the darkened silhouettes of other (virtual)
concertgoers, who look like distinct individuals moving in time to the
music. The game keeps you physically engaged the whole time; you’ll need
to move your hands and arms along with the music, and you can yell
“hello!” and “encore!” to get reactions from Miku herself. Playing can
be exhausting for both your arms and your throat.
Of course, there are plenty of aspects of a real concert
that can’t be re-created with a PSVR strapped to your face. “In an
actual concert venue, you can physically feel the loud bass with your
body, but that is not possible with VR,” says Ohtsubo. “If you just
watch a real concert through a head-mounted display, there’s always
going to be this sense that something is missing from a sensory
perspective. The biggest challenge for us was to understand the
differences in characteristics between a real-life concert and a virtual
one, and then express what would constitute ‘realistic’ in a VR world.”
There are also things the game lets you do that wouldn’t
be possible in real life. You can change your perspective of the concert
at almost any time — you can even get up on stage — and if you move in
sync with your fellow attendees, you’ll receive objects like glowsticks
and instruments that you can play with. You can also choose which songs
are sung, and at the end of each performance you have the chance for a
special one-on-one encore that transports you from a normal concert hall
to a strange, futuristic dome. “The most important thing is respecting
the feeling and experiences that are unique to VR,” Ohtsubo says of
these additions.
VR Future Live debuted with one concert, and has
since expanded with two more; “Stage three” launched earlier this month
and added six new songs to the experience. It’s the final addition to
the game — but that doesn’t mean its Miku’s final foray into virtual
reality. Though nothing has been announced yet, the team has plenty of
other ideas of how to bring the virtual pop star to VR. “Situations that
allow the player to grow closer to Miku and her friends, or maybe
dialogue with the characters could be some ideas for future
experiences,” says Hayashi. “The future is unwritten, but I hope our
team can continue creating moving experiences through the medium of VR.”
Source : TheVerge
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