In-person festivals and experiences are coming back in full force this year, and many are deploying exciting new immersive technologies that have come out of two years of evolution and innovation.
Coachella is one of the festivals leading the charge when it comes to blending the physical and digital worlds. Two members of the Coachella Innovation Team, Ryan Cenicola and Eric Wagliardo, will be speaking at XLIVExLDI on November 18th during their session Augmented Reality at Festivals: Coachella Leads the Charge.
They will discuss how they are integrating augmented reality and other cutting-edge tech to enhance the event experience for both fans attending in-person and those watching from home.
XLIVE caught up with Coachella's Ryan Cenicola and Eric Wagliardo to dig into this topic deployed at festivals in advance of their session at XLIVExLDI 2022.
XLIVE: Can you briefly describe the activations/innovations your team worked on at Coachella this year?
Ryan Cenicola and Eric Wagliardo: Coachella is a canvas for creativity. As creativity continues to transcend physical and virtual boundaries, we want to offer artists and fans the tools to create and discover in these virtual dimensions.
In 2022, we worked with independent creators from across the globe to craft over 25 unique augmented reality experiences before and during the festival and tied them together with a transmedia storytelling campaign. We jumped into gaming in partnership with Fortnite, bringing Coachella-themed outfits, items, and in-game radio to players for the first time. Finally, we brought AR to the big stage with the world’s first-ever livestream performance featuring augmented reality. Working closely with Flume and his creative team, we brought elements from his artistic world to audiences in ways that felt larger than life, with leafy trees, a Godzilla-sized parrot, and exploding flowers rising above and beyond the stage during the performance.
XL: How has the pandemic impacted the interest in and use of immersive tech at live events like Coachella?
RC and EW: We were inspired by the ingenuity of virtual performances launched during the pandemic. It is clear that these performances are an art form in themselves, allowing artists to invite their fans into their creative worlds in new ways. These virtual touch points are becoming a more important aspect of the artist-fan relationship, and we want to make sure that artists can blend their virtual worlds with their physical presence at the festival.
XL: What do currently you see as the biggest obstacles to the wider adoption of tech like AR, web3, etc. in the event/festival space?
RC and EW: We come to music festivals to be immersed in the present moment. While technology brings about new platforms for creative expression, it can also serve as a distraction to core experiences. We are interested in experimenting with a wide array of immersive experiences to better understand what types of content are additive to the fan and artist experience. Our goal is to make the technology feel like magic, a seamless interface with a creative dimension that allows fans to remain immersed in the moment.
XL: What does the future hold for AR and other immersive tech at large scale in-person events? What are you most excited about?
RC and EW: It is easy to foresee a future where fans will have the option to throw on a lightweight headset and see an entirely new, immersive layer of creativity-focused content that compliments the physical festival landscape. Upon this new layer, performing artists can augment their already expansive productions, installation artists can offer virtual extensions to their works, and fans can partake in playful virtual journeys that unlock new festival experiences. While there are many steps to this vision, we are building the infrastructure that allows creators to experiment on these new layers and demonstrate the potential of immersive physical-virtual creativity.
XL: Are there any projects/activations coming up next year that you can tease?
RC and EW: All we can say is that virtual is here to stay.