The Astonishing Future of Immersive Live Entertainment | Willie Williams | TED

Summary

The script details the groundbreaking live performance by Irish rock band U2 at the innovative Sphere in Las Vegas, a venue blending IMAX theater and planetarium elements. The show's creative director, Willy Williams, discusses the evolution of concert visuals from punk's minimalism to multiscreen presentations, leading to the Sphere's immersive, cornerless space. The audience experiences a sensory journey through virtual environments, challenging the boundaries of live entertainment and demonstrating the enduring need for shared, real-life experiences.

Takeaways

• 🎉 The Irish rock band U2 inaugurated the Sphere in Las Vegas, a new facility that blends elements of an IMAX theater and a planetarium.
• 🎬 The Sphere is designed for large-scale, high-resolution movie screenings but was reimagined for a unique live performance space.
• 👁 The absence of corners in the Sphere was leveraged to create a sense of disorientation and a new perspective for the audience.
• 🎨 The creative team, led by the speaker, experimented with virtual corners and immersive environments to alter the audience's perception of space.
• 🚀 The team's history with U2 includes over 1,000 shows in 250 cities across 40 countries, always aiming to create an emotional connection.
• 📹 In the 1990s, U2's tours like Zoot TV and Popmart pioneered the use of multiscreen, large video presentations in concert touring.
• 🌐 The pandemic spurred innovation in live entertainment, with the industry exploring XR Studios and VR experiences for virtual audiences.
• 🎭 Despite technological advancements, the desire for physical proximity and shared experiences in real-time remained paramount for audiences.
• 🏰 The speaker draws a parallel between the immersive experiences of the Sphere and the emotional impact of historical cathedrals.
• 🎼 U2's music, performed in the Sphere, created a shared, emotional experience that was described as unprecedented and overwhelmingly positive.
• 🌈 The speaker's goal is to use the power of live performance to bring people together, fostering joy, magic, and empathy among diverse audiences.

Q & A

What is the new facility in Las Vegas that the Irish rock band U2 inaugurated?

The new facility in Las Vegas is called the Sphere, which is a large, immersive space designed for showing movies at a huge scale and high resolution, and is somewhere between an IMAX theater and a planetarium.

What is unique about the design of the Sphere?

The Sphere is unique because it has no corners, which is unusual as corners typically help people navigate and feel grounded in a space. This absence of corners allows for the creation of virtual corners and the manipulation of the audience's sense of perspective.

How did the speaker's experience with U2's live performances influence the design of the show at the Sphere?

The speaker's experience with U2's live performances, which included a focus on creating emotional connections between the audience and performers, influenced the design of the show at the Sphere by aiming to create a shared, immersive environment that could evoke strong emotional responses.

What was the term coined by the speaker to describe U2's approach to stage visuals in the early 80s?

The term coined by the speaker to describe U2's approach to stage visuals in the early 80s was 'maximum minimalism,' which allowed them to maintain an authentic punk aesthetic while adapting to larger venues.

How did the speaker describe the audience's experience at the Sphere during the U2 show?

The audience's experience at the Sphere during the U2 show was described as an immersive sensory experience where their perception was choreographed by the artist on a scale that overwhelms the physical being, creating a shared, emotional connection.

What challenges did the pandemic pose to the live entertainment industry, and how did it affect the speaker's perspective on live shows?

The pandemic posed a significant challenge to the live entertainment industry, leading to a bleak time for those involved and questioning whether large gatherings would ever be possible again. It made the speaker realize the importance of physical proximity and the shared experience that cannot be replicated by virtual alternatives.

What was the speaker's goal in designing the U2 show at the Sphere?

The speaker's goal in designing the U2 show at the Sphere was to bring people together to share joy and magic, creating a genuine emotional connection between the audience, the performers, and each other through the music.

How did the speaker use the absence of corners in the Sphere to enhance the illusion of the environment?

The speaker used the absence of corners in the Sphere to create virtual corners and manipulate the audience's sense of perspective, turning the space into an infinitely tall cylinder, a cube, or other shapes, thus enhancing the illusion of the environment.

What role did the music of U2 play in the overall experience at the Sphere?

The music of U2 played a crucial role in the overall experience at the Sphere, as it allowed the audience to become part of something larger and forget themselves, connecting with the emotive power of the music performed in the immersive environment.

How did the speaker's approach to the design of the show at the Sphere differ from traditional concert touring?

The speaker's approach to the design of the show at the Sphere differed from traditional concert touring by focusing on creating a three-dimensional audiovisual space rather than just a screen, and by choreographing the audience's sensory perception to create a shared, immersive experience.

What was the significance of the audience's physical proximity in the shared experience at the Sphere?

The physical proximity of the audience in the shared experience at the Sphere was significant because it allowed for a profound and affecting connection that could not be replicated by virtual alternatives, emphasizing the importance of being together in a specific place in real time.

Outlines

00:00

🎤 Inauguration of the Sphere in Las Vegas

The speaker introduces the audience to the Sphere, a new entertainment facility in Las Vegas, which is a hybrid of an IMAX theater and a planetarium. The Irish rock band U2 inaugurated this venue, which can accommodate 18,000 people per show. The speaker, with a background in concert touring and having worked with artists like George Michael and David Bowie, discusses the evolution of concert visuals from punk's minimalism to 'maximum minimalism', which allowed for authenticity while catering to large arenas. The goal has always been to create an emotional connection between the audience and performers. The speaker also mentions the exploration of new visual technologies in the '90s, leading to the introduction of multiscreen presentations in concerts.

05:01

🌌 Transforming the Sphere into a Three-Dimensional Audiovisual Space

The speaker describes the innovative use of the Sphere's design, which lacks corners, to create a unique immersive experience. By using video on a curved surface to create virtual corners, the audience's perception of space is manipulated, transforming the venue into various shapes like a cylinder or a cube. The speaker emphasizes the importance of maintaining the illusion by establishing a sense of place before the audience arrives, creating an optical illusion of a Roman Pantheon under a night sky. Additional realistic elements like a pigeon and a helium balloon enhance the illusion, making the audience believe in the environment for the duration of the show.

10:02

🎶 The Power of Shared Experiences and Emotional Connection

The speaker reflects on the importance of live experiences and the desire of humans to gather and share experiences in real time. Despite the pandemic's impact on live entertainment, the speaker notes the industry's resilience and creativity in finding alternatives like XR Studios and VR headsets. However, the speaker points out that these alternatives failed to capture the essence of live experiences that audiences crave. The speaker discusses the emotional response evoked by the night sky or the ocean and how this response can be harnessed in art and performances. The goal of the speaker's work is to bring people together to share joy, magic, and create emotional connections through music, which holds personal significance for each attendee.

Keywords

💡Sphere

The 'Sphere' refers to a new facility in Las Vegas that is described as being between an IMAX theater and a planetarium. It is large enough to contain the Statue of Liberty and is designed for showing movies at a massive scale and high resolution. In the context of the video, the Sphere is used to create an immersive audiovisual experience, challenging traditional concert and theater formats.

💡Immersive

The term 'immersive' is used to describe an experience that surrounds and involves the audience completely, engaging their senses and creating a deep connection with the performance. In the video, the speaker discusses how the Sphere allows for an immersive experience by manipulating the audience's sense of perspective and altering the space visually and audibly.

💡Maximum Minimalism

'Maximum Minimalism' is a phrase coined by the speaker to describe an approach to stage design that maintains an authentic feel while accommodating large-scale performances in arenas and stadiums. It represents a balance between simplicity and the grandeur needed for big shows, as mentioned in the script when discussing the evolution of U2's concert staging.

💡Multiscreen

In the context of the video, 'multiscreen' refers to the use of multiple large video screens in concert touring, a style introduced by U2 during their Zoot TV and PopMart tours. This technology enhances the visual storytelling aspect of live performances, creating a dynamic and engaging experience for the audience.

💡LED Video Screen

An 'LED Video Screen' is a large display technology used for visual presentations. The script mentions the construction of the world's first stadium-scale LED video screen for U2's PopMart tour, highlighting the innovation and ambition in concert production to create a more immersive and visually stunning experience.

💡VR (Virtual Reality)

VR, or Virtual Reality, is a technology that simulates an environment and allows users to interact within that space. The speaker compares the experience in the Sphere to VR, suggesting that the environment created there is three-dimensional and immersive, akin to what one might experience in a VR setting, but without the need for a headset.

💡Perspective

Perspective in art and design is the representation on a flat surface of what the viewer's eye would see in a three-dimensional space. The script discusses how the absence of corners in the Sphere and the use of video can manipulate perspective, creating the illusion of different environments and altering the audience's perception of the space.

💡Choreographed

In the video, 'choreographed' refers to the deliberate and artistic arrangement of elements to create a cohesive and impactful performance. The speaker talks about how the sensory perception of the audience is choreographed by the artist, indicating a carefully planned and executed experience.

💡Emotional Connection

The term 'emotional connection' is used to describe the bond or resonance established between the audience and the performers. The speaker emphasizes that the goal of their work is to create this connection, which is essential for a profound and shared experience during live performances.

💡Renaissance

The 'Renaissance' was a period of cultural, artistic, and scientific rebirth in Europe. In the script, it is mentioned in the context of the use of perspective by Renaissance painters to create depth on a flat canvas. This historical reference is used to draw a parallel between the techniques of that era and the immersive experiences created in the modern Sphere.

💡Empathy

Empathy is the ability to understand and share the feelings of others. The speaker mentions that their goal is to foster empathy among strangers who might not agree on anything else, suggesting that shared experiences, like those in the Sphere, can bridge differences and create a sense of unity.

Highlights

Introduction of a new immersive facility in Las Vegas, the sphere, which is a hybrid of an IMAX theater and a planetarium.

The sphere's size is large enough to contain the Statue of Liberty, offering a unique experience for live shows.

The speaker's background in designing and directing live shows, including collaborations with George Michael and David Bowie.

The concept of 'maximum minimalism' in stage design, balancing authenticity with the scale of large venues.

Innovation in concert touring with multiscreen presentations and the first stadium-scale LED video screen during the '90s.

The speaker's role in challenging and reinventing the concept of a rock concert through creative collaboration.

The idea of creating virtual corners in the sphere to manipulate audience perspective and alter the space.

Transforming the sphere into different shapes, like a cylinder or cube, to create an illusion of a three-dimensional space.

The importance of establishing a sense of place before the audience arrives to maintain the illusion.

The audience's sensory perception being choreographed on a scale that overwhelms the physical being.

The critical acclaim and internet buzz following the show's reception, indicating a new era of live entertainment.

The impact of the pandemic on live entertainment and the industry's response with alternatives like XR Studios and VR.

The realization that live experiences are irreplaceable, with audiences craving physical proximity and shared experiences.

The comparison of the sphere's immersive experience to VR without a headset, with shared environments.

The historical context of cathedral builders and their understanding of creating large-scale, immersive experiences.

The speaker's goal to bring people together for joy, magic, and emotional connection through shared experiences.

The potential of creating empathy between strangers through the shared experience of live performances.

Transcripts

I would love to um show you something

brand new that just happened in Las

[Music]

Vegas even better than the real

thing even better than the real

[Music]

[Music]

[Applause]

even thank you uh the Irish rock band

You2 of course inaugurating the sphere

in Las Vegas a brand new facility which

is somewhere between an IMAX theater and

a planetarium large enough to contain

the Statue of

Liberty after Decades of Big Rock shows

being staged mostly in sport

facilities for 40 shows 18,000 people a

night were immersed in sound and vision

in a whole new way and um did anybody go

by the way I know some people go oh yeah

okay did anybody not

go okay great well then you'll know what

I'm talking about so I design and direct

live shows and

um the um foundations of my work were in

concert touring and I got to work with

some really cool people including George

Michael R David Bowie and many more and

for 40 years I've been creative director

for you's live performances going from

small clubs to football

stadiums and um having done well over a

thousand shows with them in 250 cities

in 40

countries I uh yeah it's been a journey

um I head up you's long-standing

creative team and every time we go to

make a new show we're

trying to reinvent the form in some way

starting with a blank slate and checking

out everything that's gone before except

for one thing which is always the goal

of creating emotional connection between

the audience and the

performers so in the very early 80s uh

you was building on the roots of punk

which came from this very pure and

minimal place where making any effort at

all with your stage visuals was

considered extremely go and very uncool

but as the scale of you two shows

increased we coined the phrase maximum

minimalism and that got us into a place

where we could kind of hang on to some

of this imagined authenticity whilst

catering to the needs of playing Arenas

and football stadiums and it really

worked I mean the the raw energy of

those shows was incredible but from a

design point of view there's really any

so far you can take that idea before you

hit a world so uh we were looking for

new possibilities in visual storytelling

and through the '90s

completely fell in love with all the new

emerging visual Technologies and so

embraced those threw away the handbook

and decided to see what we could do with

them and on a pair of you tours Zoot TV

and

popmart uh we pretty much introduced the

style of multiscreen big video

presentation that's still around today

in uh in concert touring and that

included for popmart the building of the

world's very first Stadium scale LED

video screen which was handbuilt from

components for the tour they're not

unambitious these people since then

we've made shows large and small some

leading into audio visual ideas others

taking a more architectural stance and

along the way collaborating with a

veritable who's who of the Contemporary

artart world but always with the goal of

trying to challenge and reinvent the

notion of what a rock concert can

be after 40 Years of reinvention I

suppose maybe there was another wall

lubing um so when we heard about this

new building that was going up in Las

Vegas we went to check it out and the

sphere is designed essentially for

showing movies at humongous scale at

extremely high

resolution but I found myself looking at

the space and wondering if there was

some other way that we might be able to

inhabit this wraparound immersive space

and the thing that occurred to me the

thing that really struck me was the

absence of Corners we navigate space via

corners and you know how big the room is

that you're in because you can see the

corners and that helps you feel grounded

whereas at the Sphere not only are there

no corners but I wondered if we were to

introduce virtual corners of our own

would we be able to manipulate the

audience's sense of perspective and

apparently alter the space

radically so I made a whole load of test

material and was absolutely Overjoyed at

how well it worked the degree to which

your brain wants to bind to the illusion

is extraordinary and I found that I

could take this sphere and turn it into

an infinitely tall cylinder and then

maybe into a cube and then bring the

roof down on top of everybody and

everything you're seeing all of this is

just video on a curved

surface but um it what it informed me

was that I need to stop thinking about

this as being a screen and start

thinking of it as being a place a

three-dimensional audiovisual space and

that the kind of environments that would

work here might be the kind of thing

You' make for VR rather than for Cinema

now to make the illusion work uh it's

vital never to break the spell so this

sense of place has to be established

before the viewer even gets there and

when the U audience arrived at the

sphere they walked into this gigantic

optical illusion the scale of it really

was shocking and they walked into this

thing which looked like an oversized

version of the pantheon in Rome uh but

made out of giant concrete slabs and out

to the night sky and I used to love EAS

dropping on audience conversations of

people just trying to figure out what

they were looking at you know what was

real and what

wasn't and but it had a genuine

materiality that was that was really

hard to resist so over time I added some

features to make it even harder to

resist my favorite being this pigeon

which used to live up in the roof space

and periodically fly around before

eventually escaping through the

Oculus and I put in a a helium balloon

like a kid's helium balloon that got

stuck in the roof like happens at

shopping mall and there was a work light

that would come on and Flicker and then

right at Showtime we'd fly the band's

helicopter over the roof with a suitable

soundtrack um now you know reality check

that band doesn't actually travel by

helicopter and none of this is real

anyway but the point is you are in this

environment for over an hour and you

never stop believing in it and that's

before the show even started so so

during the show we immerse the audience

in new worlds overwhelm their senses

push the Horizon back to Infinity shape

shift the room and then eventually make

the building disappear alt together and

reveal Las Vegas

outside so this is the moment that we

find ourselves in an entire audience's

sensory perception being choreographed

by the artist on a scale that overwhelms

the physical

being and you's music the the emotive

power of that Music performed in this

environment that was what was so new

that produced something really

unprecedented well to say it was well

received would be something of an

understatement um the the critics raved

the internet broke a whole new era of

live entertainment was declared to the

point where the reviews themselves were

being

reviewed some irony I think but um I'll

take it I mean GE you don't get that

very often

so but what was more remarkable was that

it was just a couple of years

after um you know we all wondered if

we'd ever be able to gather thousands of

people together ever again and the

pandemic was it was a really Bleak time

for everybody involved in live

entertainment and I know you guys at Ted

had a tough time with it too but the

brightest minds of the industry by way

of compensation started to come up with

Alternatives and we saw some really

interesting ideas we saw the

construction of XR Studios for live

broadcast and concerts for VR headsets

and virtual audiences like this

participating in real time online and

really interesting ideas they got a ton

of attention load and loads of

investment until lockdown ended at which

point nobody ever mentioned them

again so I got to tell you for those of

us that do this for a living it was

profoundly humbling to realize that we

can reproduce every part of the live

experience apart from the bit the

audience actually wants the

most like it turns out humans are drawn

to proximity we want to come together in

a specific place in real time to share

an experience kind of like we're doing

this week you know and it's been my U

task to understand how audiences work

and there's certainly something to learn

from our response as we look out at the

ocean or up at the night sky where our

minds are using a combination of vision

and Imagination to create an emotional

response that can Inspire us or

sometimes completely overwhelm us but

the interesting thing is we so need this

response that it still works even if our

rational Minds know that what we're

looking at isn't real

hence the power of great works of

art now the Renaissance painters hit

upon the use of perspective to create

apparently three-dimensional worlds on

what the viewer knew had to be a flat

plane and our brain insists it's real

even though we know it's just marks on

canvas but better yet the use of

perspective allows the viewer to forget

the technique completely and surrender

to the content of the image in a more

profound and emotional way but we're

still separated from the image here

we're still Outsiders looking in whereas

at the sphere we all together performers

and audience traveled through the

picture frame through the prenium and

ended up as part of the

environment and it really was quite

something it was like VR without a

headset although with a couple of

important differences in his novel

rainbows end the writer Verna vinger inv

visited a world that doesn't seem too

far away now where everybody through the

use of wearable AR technology

could create their own bespoke

artificial environments now at this U

show the environments were artificial

but they were also shared all of us

experiencing it together in real life

and much as I do believe that gaming and

certain other online activities can

produce a real sense of

connection it was the physical proximity

here that produced something so profound

and so affecting and you's music just

the m i me music the the original imers

experience performed in this

environment music can bring us together

and it allows us to forget oursel as we

become part of something larger looking

up at something So

Glorious and so

magnificent but we've seen this before

right we recognize this from

somewhere the cathedral Builders they

knew a thing or two about Show

Business uh they were very good at it

and they were not afraid of working at

scale being the original practitioners

of what we call in the business go big

or go

home and look the amount of time the

amount of resources poured into the

building of these places over centuries

tells us that we've been feeling for

this experience for as long as we've

been

human or and

wonder placed under the control of the

artist and today we have the most

powerful tools we've ever had to do this

so what's our motivation here you know

what's our what's our goal in doing this

well for me in my my work I only have

one goal which is to bring people

together to share some joy and to share

some magic and to make genuine emotional

connection between for the audience with

the performers and with each other and

with this music which means something

unique and personal to everyone who

attends and in that moment open up the

possibility of creating empathy between

strangers who might not agree on

anything

else it's a small thing but it's a

start and that's what my particular

brand of magic exists for well that I'm

giving people a really really good

[Music]

[Applause]

[Music]

[Music]

time y yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah

yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah

yeah thank you have a great week

[Applause]