Volta Is Bringing the Next Phase of Mixed Reality to Live Performances

Incorporating interesting and immersive graphics into live music performances — whether in-person or virtual — is more important than ever, as fans around the world crave unique experiences and shows become increasingly interactive.

However, immersive 3D visuals are often out of reach for many artists due to the high cost and technical skill required to bring them to life. Self-service mixed reality (XR) platform Volta is aiming to change that. Volta recently launched a new version of its Volta Create product, which is completely free and enables any artist to design and build mixed reality worlds for their live performances (or music videos) based on music and visual media inputs.

“Our mission is to help make mixed reality its own legitimate art form,” explains Volta co-founder and CEO Alex Kane. “We think it's going to be on par with fine art and cinema and music, but it's never going to get there until people have the tools accessible to them. We want to see experiences become a canvas, and from a business standpoint, we want to become the de facto paintbrush.”

Volta is natively audio reactive, renders in real time, and builds a 3D spatial world that artists can place themselves inside of. The goal of the platform was to create “a synesthetic experience for a live event where the physical movement of electronic artists, the world being shown on the LED wall behind them, and the actual music that they've created could become one cohesive element,” says Kane. It also includes a native integration with Traktor and Ableton.

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The product offers artists varying degrees of control and creativity depending on what they’re looking to do — they can start creating from scratch with a blank world and add various design elements of their choice, or they can choose from many base worlds that are already loaded into the platform. For example, Volta Create was recently used by BONOBO, Jamie Jones, and other artists at Glastonbury, and the worlds they used for their sets are now available on Volta for other artists to explore.

With the rise of virtual experiences due to the pandemic, Volta has also been focusing on enabling hybrid shows. “What we're starting to see more and more is people using it for hybridizing,” notes Kane, where artists play a show in a venue and stream it, immersive visuals included, to a digital platform such as YouTube, Twitch, or TikTok.

A particularly exciting aspect of this approach, which is something Volta is currently working on building out with the help of a recent grant from the UK government, is the use of global audience interaction features. These features enable artists using Volta Create to leverage fan interaction data like chat messages to create a even more immersive and interactive experience.

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This was the approach taken by Machinedrum at a show earlier this summer when he streamed a live show from New York to both his YouTube channel and Point Blank Music School’s channel. “We had interactions from both streams simultaneously coming back to the computer running Volta during his set,” explains Kane. “People from around the world were actually having an impact on the visuals in the actual room and on the streams for everyone else.”

“That's become core not only to what our business does and the value that we can add to musicians,” he continues, “but it also underlies where we think entertainment in general is going, which is that it's going to become currently participatory and inherently interactive.”

Up next for Volta is further leveraging the UK government grant — with the help of a behavioral scientist — to do a deep dive into “what is it about shared social experiences, particularly around music, that brings us so much joy and a sense of unity,” says Kane.

He emphasizes that the goal is not to replicate things that exist in the real world in a digital format, but to investigate deeper questions such as, What is fandom? Why do we like these things as people? What is it emotionally that drives us to participate in these experiences?

“What we want to do is meaningfully translate analog behaviors into digital ones where the technology doesn't get in the way,” says Kane, “because more often than not, it does. We want to determine what would be really meaningful, given that this new technology is emerging and that we want to be at the forefront of it, but we want to do it in a way that’s smart and meaningful and thoughtful. I think the floodgates are open when it comes to the future of mixed reality in entertainment, but I think it does take the level of consideration that we are very deliberately trying to put into it to actually do it right.”

Artists can download Volta and start creating their performances here.