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Physical+Virtual Events

Two recent live events show how entertainment brands are moving into games, and game engines are moving into entertainment.

The 10th annual League of Legends World Championship has just finished (Korea’s Damwon Gaming team won). The final is famed for its opening ceremony; this year saw physical music stars and dancers perform with the virtual group K/DA, in an augmented reality experience created with live in-camera digital effects and broadcast on the big screens of Pudong football stadium to 6,000 fans

The quarter-finals of the competitions used virtual studios: the room the contestants played in had walls and floor made of LED screens which ran animations to provide optical illusions, enhanced by in-camera AR. This meant that the dancers in the opening sections could interact with the digital effects in real-time.

This behind-the-scenes video explains the technology (also used in the Disney+ show, The Mandalorian) and shows more effects that it enabled.

In the same weekend, Fortnite’s Party Royale Island hosted a 30+ minute set by musician J Balvin, using a virtual studio and post-production effects (as well as some cute ghost costumes).

The New York Times has an in-depth piece on how the J Balvin set was recorded—including its virtual guest stars, recorded separately in front of a green screen, then added later.

The LoL World Championship was an IRL event augmented with digital; Fortnite’s Afterlife Party was a digital event enhanced by IRL enhanced by digital!

Lockdowns around the world make it hard to produce live (or as-live) entertainment events, but the desire to be entertained hasn’t gone away. Entertainment (and fashion) brands moving into games is one of the most interesting shifts happening in digital at the moment; another is the move in the opposite direction, where the graphics engines which power those games (like Epic’s Unreal Engine) are starting to be used for real-time digital effects in visual media. A great merge is underway.