Splendour XR and the folly of recreating the live experience

Splendour XR is now a couple of months in the rear view mirror, but someone asked me about it last week so it’s probably time for me to put some thoughts down.

I have a lot of thoughts about Splendour XR.

For context, Splendour In The Grass is one of the biggest music festivals on the Australian calendar, usuaully taking place in Byron Bay around July each year with a mix of international and local acts. It’s been a few years since I’ve gone in person, but it’s a genuinely fun festival.

But the pandemic has made physical festivals a little tricky, so this year Splendour promoted “Splendour XR” promising to be a unique virtual festival experience available at home.

In theory, this should hit the venn diagram of things that Leigh likes

And yet here I am telling you, overall it was a bit shit.

It pains me to say that. I don’t want to be raining on their parade because cultural events like Splendour should be encouraged to find new and interesting ways to integrate technology. But there were some problems…

How Splendour XR worked

From a festival goer’s point of view, Splendour XR. You buy your $50 ticket for the weekend, create an account at Sansar, download their Windows app and login. Sansar lets you create a custom avatar, and then you can explore a 3D recreation of the Splendour site either with mouse/keyboard, or by plugging in a VR headset.

When you do eventually arrive at a stage to see a band, you’re treated to a giant video screen playing some pre-recorded footage of the band playing, or in some cases a 2D cutout of the band playing at actual scale (where they’ve been filmed on a green screen)

But there’s a third option to watch these pre-recorded live sets: The Sansar website & app. It’s a pretty basic streaming system with multiple camera angles from the virtual environment, but fortunately one of those angles is just a full-screen view of the band video playing.

How Splendour XR didn’t work

The XR part wasn’t great.

I did actually spend a little time wanding around in 3D, and even put my VR headset on for a bit and chatted to some other attendees. But because you’re just watching bands on a virtual video screen, it doesn’t feel worthwhile, (and the video quality in 3D was worse!) you’re losing pixels by just having the billboard on a plane in 3D space. You’re plonked in an area with just a handful of other live people, and a whole lot of copypasted filler - it definitely didn’t make me feel like part of the crowd.

Everyone I spoke to while in the 3D space had (like me) just nicked in for a quick play around and was going back to watch on the website. Most were either playing with Chromecast or had just plugged laptops into their TVs and sound systems.

There was text chat available to communicate with other festival-goers, but it consisted of 30% jokes about scoring nangs (never gets old…), and another 30% was people asking how to get Chromecast working (short answer, it’s a pain.)

Also the schedule of the festival was straight-up annoying. When you’re at a festival with multiple stages, of course clashes are going to happen where two bands you want to see are on at the same time. But having that same problem at a virtual festival seems crazy… It feels like they’re emulating the wrong things: I don’t go to a music festival because I can miss an artist due to a timetable clash, I go in spite of it.

But a lot of the “XR” part of Splendour XR just felt… inessential? The multiple stages, the wandering around, the branded booths… I understand that people miss the live music experience (I certainly do!!!), but it just didn’t feel like it hit the mark. Some of Splendour XR’s choices seem to betray an almost fundamental lack of understanding of the reasons people go to music festival.

It’s not like Coles online forces you to wander the isles of a virtual reality supermarket just to find where the harissa paste is. That challenge is a disadvantage of the physical world, not something that’s worth recreating.

The good

Alright, I’ll stop moaning. Splendour XR got a few critical things correct.

First up, the lineup of artists. YMMV of course, but felt like an interesting mix of artists and I caught a few that I wasn’t really aware of before. It’s always nice leaving a festival having discovered some new bands to explore. Secondly, the actual performances and associated audio production were all pretty great. The other piece of the puzzle was the video production, which given the emphasis was suitibly ace.

(Although, the less said about Grimes' phoned in discord thing though, the better.)

If you were to measure Splendour XR just as a music festival, it would pass with flying colours.

Where to next?

Like I said at the top, I want to encourage festivals, cultural events and the arts at large to embrace these new technologies. Of course not everything is going to be perfect the first time around, everyone is still feeling their way through this space.

So what could Splendour do next time around? Here’s some possibilities:

1. Embrace streaming video

It’s how the majority were experiencing it, so make that as good as it possibly can be. The live experience and chat was good, but having a system that supports Chromecast properly is a must (espeically if you’re going to advertise taht you support it.) Also if it’s live - tweak/extend the schedule to avoid having clashes.

2. Make XR worthwhile

The best VR experiences take advantage of the unique nature of the format and provide something that you can’t do in any other way. Not just having a cut out 2D singer dancing on a 3D stage…

In a headset you get amazing spatial audio depending on where you’re standing an where you’re looking - why not have individual instruments tracked separately and allow festival goers to walk amongst the band, find their own mix. The bands could be digitised as avatars, or using volumetric capture. Instead of wandering in front of the stage, you could wander amongst the band while they’re performing

This is obviously more complex than just shooting video, but there are some precendents (I think Thomas Dolby was playing around with this stuff in the 90s…) At least then there’s a compelling reason to try the digial experience as opposed to something better viewed on a flat screen.

Next year?

With vaccination rates rapidly increasing, it feels likely Splendour are counting on not needing to do this again. Despite my reservations about this year’s Splendour XR, I think that’s a shame. Getting a virtual festival right shouldn’t just be possible, but it’s also a worthwhile endavour to explore how we interact with music into the future.

(My tip is maybe someone like Flaming Lips getting this right first - they’ve got runs on the board with the Parking Lot Experiments and their insane multitrack 4-CD album Zaireeka)